WTF Community

Day 448

General Discussion
#1

Updated 4/12/2018 10:37 AM PDT

1/ Steve Bannon is working with White House aides and Congressional allies on a plan to cripple Robert Mueller's probe. The plan involves firing Rod Rosenstein, refusing to cooperate with Mueller's team, and having Trump assert executive privilege "retroactively" in order to argue that Mueller's interviews with White House officials over the past year should now be null and void. Bannon also said "Ty Cobb should be fired immediately." Trump, however, tweet that he has "full confidence in Ty Cobb." (Washington Post)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/04/12/day-448/
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#2

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai on Thursday rejected a request from a dozen senators to investigate Sinclair Broadcast Group for “distorting news” coverage.

The senators — 11 Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) — asked the FCC to review Sinclair’s broadcast license and pause its proposed merger after the company had anchors across the country read scripted promos warning of “fake news” and media bias.

However, Pai turned down their request, saying an investigation would conflict with his commitment to the First Amendment and freedom of the press, according to a letter obtained by The Hill.

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#3

Trump’s personal attorney Michael D. Cohen sometimes taped conversations with associates, according to three people familiar with his practice, and allies of the president are worried that the recordings were seized by federal investigators in a raid of Cohen’s office and residences this week.

Cohen, who served for a decade as a lawyer at the Trump Organization and is a close confidant of Trump, was known to store the conversations using digital files and then replay them for colleagues, according to people who have interacted with him.

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#4

The ruling in a lawsuit Los Angeles brought against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions marks a new setback in President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on sanctuary cities where police forces have refused to get involved in enforcing immigration law.

U.S. District Judge Manuel Real agreed in a ruling Wednesday with the city’s argument that the Justice Department had abused its power by awarding bonus points to grant applicants that commit to cooperating with federal immigration authorities and policies. The grant program was created to help local police departments hire officers for community-oriented policing, or COPS.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/los-angeles-wins-suit-against-sessions-over-immigration-policy

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#5

Those are some tiny bats :woman_facepalming:t2:

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#6

Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

But seriously, this Cohen is a real piece of work. From the article:

In one instance, Cohen played a recording of a conversation he had with someone else to a Trump campaign official to demonstrate that he was in a position to challenge that person’s veracity if necessary, an associate recalled.

Cohen indicated that he had something to use against the person he had taped, the associate said.

What kind of person does this? Trump sure acts like a mob boss and Cohen sure acts like a mob lawyer.

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#8

Nice Comey reference! Who else has pre-ordered his book? :grinning:

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#9

Nice Comey reference! Who else has pre-ordered his book? :grinning:

Have you guys been to lyincomey .com? It’s such a farce! Pure propaganda. :joy::joy::joy:

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#10

I want to tease a quote out of this article.

Quote:

Three sources familiar with the investigation said the findings Mueller has collected on Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice include: His intent to fire former FBI Director James Comey; his role in the crafting of a misleading public statement on the nature of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son and Russians; Trump’s dangling of pardons before grand jury witnesses who might testify against him; and pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

NBCnews just stated four counts of Obstruction of Justice. So to reiterate in an easier to understand format I’ve listed them here. :point_down:

  1. Firing Comey
  2. Misleading statement about Trump Tower Meeting
  3. Offering pardons to witnesses (Manafort?)
  4. Pressuring Sessions to not recuse himeself

Source:

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#11

I keep asking myself, “What’s the end game here?”. If Mueller turns his report over to Congress, will both Democrats and Republicans get a copy? What if Congress is still controlled by it’s current group of mouthbreathers and they decide just to shred it? I don’t think the stable genius is going to go out with a resignation unless, like Nixon, he is very likely to lose when facing prosecution. Even though the evidence is overwhelming, his love of self will far exceed his deference to the country that made his family rich. What if this idiot gets us into a shooting war with Russia and/or China because his intentions, and more importantly, his word, cannot be trusted? What does the rest of the world really think about a man who writes bat shit crazy tweets timestamped between 3 and 4 in the morning?

I just want him to go away. If it’s through the electoral process and 2 more years of lame duckness, that’s ok too, but it would be better for everyone if he just left quietly and the sooner the better.

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#12

@TheHellYouSay

Unfortunately, that may be the only way unless the president resigns. Impeachment is highly unlikely even if the Democrats take back the house and senate. Voting Trump out is our only sure option.

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#13

Bring it on…lets get Mueller to send in his reports 6 weeks earlier and see what kind of legal jeopardy T is in…Could there be indictments? Who gets to see this report aside from Rosenstein, if he still has a job.

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#15

Good question!

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#16

The Pompeo confirmation hearing for Secretary of State was not a shoe in. Pompeo was breezy and an easy interview…but there is some big push back. He’s a walking contradiction with his views, hawkish, but not saying he believed that ‘war is not the answer.’

“In five hours of testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Pompeo, now the C.I.A. director, said he was hoping for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis, still believed that the Iran nuclear deal could be saved, disagreed with the president’s assertion that poor relations with Russia had been caused by the special counsel’s investigation and, perhaps most remarkably, promised to defend gay rights around the world.”

and NPR’s

“War is always the last resort,” he said. “I would prefer achieving the president’s foreign policy goals with unrelenting diplomacy.”

The hearing comes amid a range of pressing foreign policy questions for the United States, including how to respond to a suspected chemical attack in Syria, how to handle relations with North Korea, and how to counter various aggressions from Russia.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., asked Pompeo whether he agreed with a number of hawkish statements toward North Korea, Cuba and Iraq by John Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser. Merkley explained that he was asking about Bolton’s statements because Americans want to know whether “a war Cabinet of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo” is being assembled, moving the country toward “another poorly thought-through mistake like our war on Iraq.”

“I’ve been part of this Cabinet,” Pompeo replied, “and I can tell you … every day at the forefront of our mind is how can we find solutions that achieve the American objective but avoid us having to put a single American in harm’s way.”

“His testimony in both tone and substance was so different from his past statements and profile as a Tea Party congressman from Wichita, Kan., that Democrats on the committee were left puzzled and, almost despite themselves, delighted. Gone was any hint of the warmonger his critics have portrayed him as.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article208630194.html

" CIA Director Mike Pompeo failed to disclose last year that he owned a Kansas business that imported oilfield equipment from a company owned by the Chinese government.

That omission, on the questionnaire Pompeo was required to fill out for Senate confirmation to lead the spy agency, could cause a problem for him in Thursday’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.

The issue with the Chinese company, which was confirmed in a series of documents obtained by McClatchy this week, never came up during his confirmation hearings last year. Many senators contacted Wednesday were reluctant to comment until they had more information."

#17

Lots of reviews of Comey’s book tonight (Daily Beast, Politico, WaPo, MSNBC)…“scathing indictment of T…” Well, that’s what we thought was going to be said.

This from Mother Jones

"Trump was two weeks away from being sworn in as president. He was just informed that the US national security establishment had confirmed its assessment that Vladimir Putin had covertly attacked American democracy and that this assault was designed to affect the results of the election. And Trump responded with no interest in any aspect of this unprecedented intervention other than its political implications—for him. In front of the leaders of the intelligence community—two of whom would continue to work for him—Trump did not even bother to feign concern. He went straight to what mattered most: What does this mean for me?

The president-to-be was engaging in a profound dereliction of duty. His number one job is to defend the United States from foreign attack. And he didn’t give a damn. He was kicking off his presidency with an action—or inaction—that could be seen as a betrayal of the nation he was supposed to serve.

As Isikoff and I point out, after this meeting, Trump tweeted, “Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results.” This was not true. The report did not say that. And Clapper, according to Comey, had explicitly spelled this out for Trump. Still, Trump lied—and Priebus and Spicer went along.

This anecdote from Comey’s book certainly raises a question of Trump’s fitness for office. It also presents what might be an uncomfortable question for Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and Rogers. They saw an incoming president demonstrate he was unable—or unwilling—to meet his primary obligation. They did not share this with the rest of us. (Rogers still works for Trump, but he is expected to retire soon.)

Comey’s portrayal of Trump as vain, erratic, ignorant, and dismissive of the important norms of government and law enforcement is not a surprise."

Daily Beast

Politico

Excerpt
-Trump asked Comey to look into allegations in the so-called Trump-Russia dossier

"The former FBI director writes in his book that the president asked him to look into the uncorroborated allegations from the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate in front of him in a Moscow hotel room where President Barack Obama had stayed, according to a copy obtained by the New York Post. Trump, according to the report, expressed interest in digging into the claims out of concern that his wife, first lady Melania Trump, might believe them.

“He brought up what he called the ‘golden showers thing’ … adding that it bothered him if there was ‘even a 1 percent chance’ his wife, Melania, thought it was true,” Comey reportedly writes in “A Higher Loyalty.”

He added: “He just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie. I said it was up to him.”

-Comey calls Trump ‘untethered to truth,’ depicts his leadership as mafia-esque

In his forthcoming book, Comey hammers the president’s ethics and leadership, calling him “untethered to truth” and his management “ego driven and about personal loyalty,” according to The Associated Press.

And more on this
Washington Post - concerns over the lewd section of the Christopher Steele dossier…for Melania’s sanity, let’s wipe this disgusting reference out, per T to Comey."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/james-comeys-memoir-trump-fixates-on-proving-lewd-dossier-allegations-false/2018/04/12/64493866-3ce2-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html?utm_term=.bfbcc4c33553

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#18

Oh, I’m beginning to see that there is the truth. I remember when (bogus) impeachment hearings went on over Clinton’s one little white lie and everybody said “oh never again”, but now it’s a legitimate problem. Trump has way too many character flaws and financial entanglements to make decisions that favor the good of the country. In fact, if he was aware of Russian money being applied to sway the election and he didn’t act upon it, that almost seems like Treason.

What is unfortunate is that now time itself has been warped. More happens in 4 years now than what happened in 40 years back in the early days of the USA. Why don’t we change our system so that we can have a vote of “no confidence” and reboot the whole process? Or, at least have campaign & election reform of some kind so that it’s not just a complete joke. Well, we all know the answer to that, no one is going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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#19

@TheHellYouSay
I agree with you but I don’t think we’ll ever have a vote of no confidence, only because we don’t have a parliamentary system.

I think the first step to stopping this from happening again, may have to do with a better vetting process for candidates. We need a stronger primary process. The parties have the power to do that already without legislation, since they are semi-private entities, they only would need to change the bylaws.

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#20

Just when you thought you’d seen all the dirt on Elliott Broidy, a Republican National Deputy Finance Chairman . . .

Here’s a summary of just a few of Broidy’s other dubious achievements.

And if that’s not enough, here’s some more.

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Day 450
#21

@Keaton_James

“I ac­knowl­edge I had a con­sen­sual re­la­tion­ship with a Play­boy Play­mate,” Mr. Broidy said in a state­ment pro­vided by a spokesman. “At the end of our re­la­tion­ship, this woman shared with me that she was preg­nant. She alone de­cided that she did not want to con­tinue with the preg­nancy and I of­fered to help her fi­nan­cially dur­ing this dif­fi­cult pe­riod.”

Holy smokes! :flushed:

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#22

Best comment in NYT’s regarding this kerfuffle over Broidy paying for the abortion…

Readers Comments

  1. All of these conservative republicans are anti-abortion, right up until the moment their mistress needs one.

  2. While abortion rights are being taken away, bit by bit or in whole chunks, by the Republicans, here we have the deputy finance chairman of the RNC paying off a Playboy model so she can get an abortion and recover during a “difficult time” (oh and keep her mouth shut, too). The hypocrisy is mind blowing!

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