Presser with all the T buddies…Mike Lindell, of My Pillow then praised and thanked the Lord for giving us T.
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Internet confused why Trump invited My Pillow owner to public health briefing: ‘Tell me this is a prank’
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1244741551042908160
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Panicked Republicans now want to blame impeachment for bungling the coronavirus response: report
Congress was slow to understand the threat from coronavirus, and now Republicans want to blame impeachment.
Back in January, as Democrats presented their evidence in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, only a few lawmakers from both parties were urging action against the highly contagious virus that had shut down parts of China and recently arrived in the United States, reported Politico.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) became alarmed over Martin Luther King Day weekend reading reports about the coronavirus in China, which he noticed a disconnect between China’s rosy statements about the outbreak and the drastic steps it was taking to contain it.
The Arkansas Republican started pressing the White House to ban travel from China, and he called Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner and privately warned them about the coronavirus, and he also urged action from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other top officials.
Publicly, however, Trump said Jan. 22 that his team had the U.S. outbreak “totally under control,” and only 14 senators showed up for an all-Senate briefing requested by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and held on Jan. 24, which was the deadline for senators to turn in their impeachment questions.
“The initial thought from the Dems, I think, is that we were trying to distract from impeachment,” a Republican Senate aide said.
However, Democrats started stepping up their warnings shortly afterward, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged the Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 26 to declare coronavirus a public health emergency, which would free up $85 million in funding to control the outbreak.
Both of Washington state’s senators — Democrats Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — demanded Jan. 28 that Azar keep them up to date on his agency’s efforts to fight the outbreak, and the White House did heed Cotton’s advice and banned most travel from China on Jan. 31.
The impeachment trial ended Feb. 5 with Trump’s acquittal, and Cotton and other Republicans insist the process distracted lawmakers and the president — but Democrats disagree, saying the House wasn’t even briefed on the virus until the Senate trial was over.
Democrats started asking for emergency funding for the outbreak on Feb. 5, the last day of the impeachment trial, after Azar held a closed-door briefing, and they also point out that Trump and most other Republicans continued to downplay the threat well into March.
“Senate Republicans were not using February to pressure the president to get serious about an early supplemental [appropriations] request,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who tweeted out a complaint after that briefing that the administration wasn’t taking the threat seriously enough.
Democrats say, even if impeachment had never happened, they doubt Republicans would have been willing to take dramatic steps to fight a viral outbreak they mocked and downplayed until it had wrecked the economy and forced the shutdown of schools and businesses.
“In an alternate world in which impeachment wasn’t happening, I don’t think the replacement would have been an earlier bill on coronavirus,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA). “Even as we were passing our Phase 1 coronavirus bill many House Republicans were not taking coronavirus seriously, even mocking the issue.”
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FFS
I have to think the urgent need for the GOP Senate to investigate Hunter Biden in the middle of a raging pandemic has to do with Trump’s utter failure to lead and Joe Biden’s increasingly presidential interviews and talks.
Senators clashed over Hunter Biden probe in classified briefing
A Senate committee is pressing ahead with an investigation into the former vice president’s son even as the coronavirus pandemic rages on.
And this is WHILE calling any oversight of Trump during this all a witch hunt.
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President Donald Trump on Friday announced he would pick a young and inexperienced judge from Kentucky for an open seat on the influential federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., that decides some of the nation’s most important regulatory and constitutional cases.
Justin Walker, 37, of Louisville became a judge in October, when the Senate voted 50-41 to confirm him to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky.
Now, six months later, Trump has nominated Walker to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The court hears cases of national importance on environmental, labor, immigration and other policy issues; it has been known as a steppingstone to a seat on the Supreme Court.
He is the youngest nominee to the D.C. Circuit in a generation, said Mike Davis, the founder and president of The Article III Project, which works to support the confirmation of Trump’s judicial picks.
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Sideshow Rudy…takes on the role of personal scientist to T.
Their mantra ‘if it sounds like a cure, we should say it is a cure.’
Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was in the center of the impeachment storm earlier this year as an unpaid private attorney for President Trump, has cast himself in a new role: as personal science adviser to a president eager to find ways to short circuit the coronavirus epidemic.
In one-on-one phone calls with Trump, Giuliani said, he has been touting the use of an anti-malarial drug cocktail that has shown some early promise in treating covid-19, but whose effectiveness has not yet been proved. He said he now spends his days on the phone with doctors, coronavirus patients and hospital executives promoting the treatment, which Trump has also publicly lauded.
I discussed it with the president after he talked about it,” Giuliani said in an interview. “I told him what I had on the drugs.”
The Washington Post: Top Stories | Giuliani, a familiar voice in Trump’s ear, promotes experimental coronavirus treatments
Trump Is Gutting Our Democracy While We’re Dealing with Coronavirus
The president’s firing of the intelligence watchdog who validated the Ukraine whistle-blower complaint is his latest threat to the rule of law.
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Looks like Sen Grassley (Sen Finance Chair) is having a moment of conscious and asking T for an explanation on why T fired Atkinson…and checking on what his motives were…Sen Warner (D-VA) Intelligence and Sen Collins (R-ME) are also supporting this inquiry as well.
Sen. Chuck Grassley is working on a bipartisan letter addressed to President Donald Trump demanding an explanation for the firing of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, according to aides in both parties.
The Senate Finance Committee chairman is still working to secure cosponsors for the letter, a Republican aide said. The letter will focus on Atkinson’s Friday firing amid a broader purge by the president of inspectors general.
The letter is supported by Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
Trump said recently that he fired Atkinson for doing a “terrible job” with a whistleblower report that kicked off the president’s impeachment. Atkinson said he was likely fired for “having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial inspector general.”
The letter was first reported by Bloomberg.
Grassley’s office did not comment other than to point to a Tuesday statement reiterating his support for inspectors general and urging the president to use them. Grassley also said he would seek more explanation from Trump in the immediate aftermath of Atkinson’s firing. He’s also been a longtime advocate for inspectors general and whistleblowers.
“Inspectors general provide a critical check on an otherwise unaccountable bureaucracy. In other words, they help drain the swamp. Their duty is to provide nonpartisan recommendations and remove politics from the inner workings of our federal government. The White House should empower inspectors general so they’re able to do their job," Grassley said, citing recent IG work on surveillance of the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
He also hinted that Trump owes the public more information.
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A pretty accurate assessment of all of this:
Oversight erased, Supreme Court hijacked: Trump turns the presidency into a dictatorship
Trump has stripped away the levers of independent oversight until there’s nothing left. Our democracy is in the midst of a three-alarm fire.
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The issue is T and his constant going after Governors, press during this pandemic where a leader with more gravitas would be pulling the country together. Interesting that the R’s are pulling back from full support by publicly stating his ‘messaging’ is off.
Whether this translates to T losing their loyalty and creating real disenfranchisement is the question.
Representative Paul Mitchell, a Michigan Republican, said he had contacted a senior White House official, as well as Ms. Whitmer herself, to express his unhappiness about their mutual sniping.
“It is not helpful to hurl names and talk about badly about people,” Mr. Mitchell said. “We need to focus on the problem.”
At Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, staff members have closely monitored internal polling data showing an erosion of the gains Mr. Trump made immediately after he put social distancing guidelines in place. Advisers are torn between knowing that a less abrasive approach would help Mr. Trump and their awareness that he can’t tolerate criticism, regardless of the setting.
Mr. Trump’s limited gains in the polls are all the more striking when compared with those made by governors in both parties; many are enjoying double-digit gains in their approval ratings. And Mr. Trump’s penchant for ad hominem attacks, Republicans say, illustrates why he has little room for growth among the electorate.
“He can’t escape his instincts, his desire to put people down, like Mitt Romney, or to talk about his ratings,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “That’s why he’s not getting the George W. Bush post-9/11 treatment. A leader in this sort of crisis should have a 75-to-80-percent approval rating.”
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Bill Barr is at it again. I think the tweet at the bottom summarizes it nicely.
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No kidding…T n’ Co travel alot…and to their properties. It costs a lot.
In the past two years, Trump’s family has gone on more than 3,200 protected trips, almost 50 percent more than the number of protected trips taken by former White House officials. The number of trips taken by Trump’s family in the past two years is more than three times the number taken by Obama’s family from 2010 to 2016. Trump, Melania Trump and his family took about 4,200 trips in fiscal 2018 and 2019 — about as many as Obama, Michelle Obama and Obama’s family took from 2010 through 2015.
Many of Trump’s own trips have been to properties he owns. In recent weeks, though, he hasn’t visited any Trump Organization properties. The coronavirus pandemic has led to the second-longest stretch of Trump’s presidency in which he hasn’t visited a golf course. (The longest stretch was during the government shutdown in 2018–2019.)
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WTF…
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The teflonated President…hiding behind getting ‘stays.’
EXCLUSIVE: In the middle of playing wartime President against the coronavirus pandemic and facing a rocky re-election, Donald Trump took to the courts again today to make sure no one ever sees what really went on behind the scenes on The Apprentice .
“The Court should stay all proceedings before it pending Defendants’ appeal from the Court’s denial of their Motion to Compel Arbitration, because fundamental fairness requires it,” says a letter (READ IT HERE) sent from Trump family lawyer Joanna Hendon today to U.S. District Court Judge Lorna Schofield seeking to wrap a legal shield around unseen footage from the NBC competition series.
“Plaintiffs are now eight months into a third-party discovery campaign forbidden by the arbitration provisions to which they agreed – and to which Defendants have continually objected since August. The resulting prejudice to Defendants is obvious and incalculable” the Spears & Imas attorney adds, less than a week after the federal judge ordered long sought Apprentice video made public and rejected the desire of the Trumps and MGM to move the whole class action behind closed doors.
“The public interest also favors a stay,” Hendon argues for the former Apprentice host and his fellow defendants and offspring Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric. “This litigation concerns a private dispute that does not directly implicate any public entity or public interest that might counsel against a stay.”
The Trumps and the Trump Corporation were sued in October 2018 by four anonymous individuals on claims that they allegedly falsely encouraging people to invest in ACN’s video phone service over the 2005 to 2015 run of The Apprentice . As well as being dubious unto itself, ACN turned out to be lining the pockets of the Trumps to endorse their product – something that all parties concerned left unsaid all those years.
The main lawyer for Jane Doe, Mary Moe, Richard Roe and Luke Loe, as they are known, was quickly to wave off this new effort to stop and halt the lawsuit.
“Today’s appeal and stay request is at least the fifth attempt by the Defendants to stop this case in its tracks,” said plaintiffs’ lead lawyer Roberta Kaplan to Deadline today after Team Trump made their latest moves. “But as the Court has already explained in its well-reasoned decision last week, there is no basis to compel arbitration in this case,” the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund co-founder added. “As a result, like the others from the past, we believe that this effort too will fail. Following the Court’s important rulings next week, we look forward to continuing with document discovery and depositions, as we gather the evidence to deliver justice for our clients and thousands of others like them who were defrauded by the Trumps.”
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No words…but I’ll use @matt’s “Trump threatens to adjourn Congress to get his nominees but likely would be impeded by Senate rules”
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If we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, this would be Ukraine all over again.
Barr Pressed Australia for Help on Mueller Review as DOJ Worked to Free Its Hostages
While his deputies finalized a plan with Australian officials to free two bloggers from a Tehran prison, Bill Barr had another request: help on his look back at the Russia probe.
I n a series of conversations last September, senior Department of Justice officials worked with representatives of the Australian government to hammer out an arrangement to win the release of a pair of Australian bloggers imprisoned in Tehran.
At the same time those talks were taking place, Attorney General Bill Barr and his lieutenants were speaking to the Australians about another matter: getting their help as the Department of Justice looked into the origins of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Barr, like his boss, President Donald Trump, had long had a view of the Russia probe that bordered on hostile, and his review has been widely seen as an attempt to discredit the Mueller investigation, which led to the indictment of multiple Trumpworld associates. Just days before the culmination of talks in September—which coincided with an official Australian state visit—Trump himself pushed Prime Minister Scott Morrison to help Barr with this inquiry.
Barr followed up about the Mueller re-investigation, two U.S. officials and a third individual familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast, even as American and Australian officials finalized their arrangement to try to free the pair jailed in Iran. According to four sources—including those two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official—the American government agreed to help facilitate the release of the Australian bloggers, in part by agreeing to pull back from pursuing the extradition of an Iranian scientist held in Australia.
News of the arrangement didn’t reach the senior ranks of the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—the team in charge of coordinating the government’s diplomatic engagements on overseas hostage-related matters—until days after the deal was finalized, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. Another individual familiar with the conversations said officials in the hostage affairs office were frustrated by the lack of communication from the Department of Justice, claiming they had been cut out of a process they would have normally helped lead. At the time, the team was in conversation with Americans whose family members were held hostage in Iran. The cohort was actively lobbying the Trump administration to raise public awareness of the hostages’ cases in the hopes that it may put pressure on Tehran.
The discussions between Washington and Canberra raise questions about why the Department of Justice engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to help win the release of Australian hostages from Iran and whether the president’s request to have the country assist in Barr’s Russia inquiry influenced the department’s decision-making.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not provide an on the record comment for this story. In an email to The Daily Beast, DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec said Barr himself did not have “any conversations with the Australians about Australian bloggers or an Iranian scientist.”
Hours after publication, Kupec sent The Daily Beast another statement saying Barr “and his office knew nothing about these matters until after the fact.”
“As the Australians themselves have stated, to suggest a link between those issues and the ongoing Durham investigation is false and unsupported by the facts,” she said.
To Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, “this story suggests that the president is continuing to use the authority of his office to pressure foreign leaders into assisting him in covering up Russia’s assistance with his 2016 victory. This is the same conduct for which Trump was impeached, and the reporting suggests that he is undeterred.”
She added, “If the administration engaged in this swap as part of a deal with the Australian government in which it would support Trump’s counter-narrative to the Mueller Report, then department officials are actively using U.S. diplomacy to undermine our U.S. national security interests.”
Since the first year of his administration, former and current aides say that they’ve seen Trump “light up,” in one former senior White House official’s words, when internally discussing his impending announcements of rescued hostages, and would press aides on unusually specific details of the operations or negotiations, including on how his count of released hostages compared to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
And when it comes to enlisting foreign powers to help the Trump administration probe the feds, the president views it as a top priority. A senior administration official said that they’ve heard Trump on multiple occasions mention that any ally of the United States should help, if they can—and that chasing leads on suspected origins of the Mueller investigation is a matter of “national security.”
Trump’s phone call and Barr’s subsequent conversations with the Australians came at a time when the White House was in the midst of fending off allegations that the president had engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine. Top Democrats had obtained a whistleblower complaint alleging in part that President Trump had withheld vital military aid from Kyiv to force the Ukrainians to announce a probe into his 2020 political rival, Joe Biden.
As an impeachment probe gathered steam on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration appears to have ramped up its efforts to find willing foreign partners such as Australia to help investigate Mueller’s probe while also offering to help Morrison get his citizens out of Iranian prison.
In May of last year, about a month after the release of the Mueller report, Barr tapped Connecticut’s top federal prosecutor John Durham to lead the department’s inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation. On May 24, President Trump lauded the department’s efforts, calling the Mueller investigation “the greatest hoax, probably, in the history of our country,” adding that he hoped the attorney general would “look at Australia.”
Mueller’s report on his Russia investigation laid out how Australia played a role in the origins of the FBI probe. Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos has repeatedly claimed that he told Australia’s former foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, who was then high commissioner to the United Kingdom, that Russia had obtained negative information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and that Downer informed U.S. law enforcement.
Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, wrote to Barr on May 28 to say Canberra “stand[s] ready to provide you with all relevant information to support your inquiries,” according to a copy of the letter published by Australian media outlets.
And in September, President Trump officially asked the Morrison government for help in his phone call with the prime minister. It’s unclear if Trump spoke with Morrison about the hostage situation during the conversation. (Although Trump later discussed the hostage arrangement with Barr and other senior officials in his administration, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.) But even before Australia’s state visit to Washington that month, members of the Morrison government and senior officials at the Department of Justice were in conversation about what the U.S. could do to help with the release of the two Australian bloggers.
In July of 2019, the Iran government arrested Jolie King and Mark Firkin, who were traveling through Iran, for flying a drone near an Iranian military installment. The two were transferred to Evin Prison, one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country.
During Morrison’s visit in September, senior officials at the Department of Justice and top representatives of Morrison’s government worked on the plan to bring the bloggers home. The U.S. would step back from pursuing an extradition order for an Iranian scientist held in Brisbane. That would allow for the scientist’s release back to Iran. In exchange, the Australians could get King and Firkin out of Evin Prison.
Reza Dehbashi Kivi—a 38-year-old Iranian scientist studying in Queensland, Australia—was accused of exporting military radar equipment to help the Iranian regime detect stealth planes. The U.S. sought his extradition on six counts, including conspiring to export special amplifiers classified as “defense articles” under the U.S. munitions list, according to one of Kivi’s former attorneys.
“The U.S. government alleged he had exported these devices and required some sort of export permit to do that,” said another individual with knowledge of Kivi’s case.
Kivi remained in prison while Australia’s Attorney General’s office decided whether or not to extradite him to the United States.
It wasn’t until the Australian team left the U.S. that senior State Department officials in the hostage affairs office learned from representatives of the Australian embassy in Washington of the discussions between the Department of Justice and the Morrison government. Officials at State were told that the attorney general’s office in Australia would work directly with Barr’s office on the timing of the releases.
“Political capital should be used, first and foremost, for American citizens and U.S. lawful permanent residents,” said one individual familiar with Iranian hostage affairs issues.
Although there isn’t always a clear blueprint for handling hostage negotiations, the State Department — specifically, the presidential envoy for hostage affairs — ordinarily helps run point. And while the Department of Justice does play a leading role in the extradition process, its bypassing of the State Department on the conversations with the Australians is alarming, former officials say.
“The hostage unit in the [State] department acts as a coordinator. They’re supposed to be in on this process,” one former U.S. official who worked on hostage affairs told The Daily Beast.
Kivi was released from prison and returned back to Iran on Sept. 29, 2019—nine days after the Australian state visit to Washington. On Oct. 5, the Australian government announced that Iran had released King and Firkin. (The two did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)
At the time, there was speculation that the two events might be linked. A person directly familiar with Kivi’s case said there’s no question about it. “I have no doubt that that communication had taken place between the U.S. and Australia which affected the release of Mr. Dehbhashi,” the person told The Daily Beast.
The Australian Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. But a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade acknowledged to The Daily Beast that Australia “made clear it was willing to assist with any U.S. inquiry into the origins of the Russia probe” but said that occurred well before King and Firkin were detained.
The spokesperson said former Australian ambassador Hockey “confirmed this willingness in a letter to Attorney-General Barr.” The spokesperson repeatedly dodged questions from The Daily Beast about the conversations that took place between U.S. and Australian officials during Morrison’s State visit in September.
The office of Australian Attorney General Christian Porter directed The Daily Beast to a statement when King and Firkin were released from prison.
“I considered that, in all the circumstances of this particular case, Mr Dehbashi Kivi should not ultimately be extradited to the United States,” Porter said at the time. “Ultimately the Attorney General can and should take into account a considerably broader set of considerations.”
As the discussions were underway in Washington in September 2019, State Department officials working on hostage affairs were in New York, meeting with the families of Americans detained in Iran.
Since Kivi, King and Firkin were freed, Americans with family members detained in Iran have continued to put pressure on both the U.S. and Iranian governments to facilitate their release.
For more than 13 years the Iranian government has consistently maintained that it is unaware of the whereabouts of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in the country in 2007. In the fall of 2019, a United Nations working group concluded that there was “an on-going case in the Public Prosecution and Revolutionary Court of Tehran for Levinson”—a possible sign that the former agent was alive and that the Iranians were working toward a solution to the situation.
But last month, Levinson’s family announced that they believed he had died in Iranian custody.
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