WTF Community

Day 547

General Discussion
#1

Updated 7/20/2018 10:40 AM PDT

1/ Michael Cohen recorded a conversation with Trump two months before the presidential election discussing payments to Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump. Prosecutors want to know if Cohen's efforts to limit negative stories about Trump during the campaign violated federal campaign finance laws. The FBI seized the recording during the raid on Cohen's office. Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Trump had discussed the payments with Cohen on the tape, but said the payment was ultimately never made. (New York Times)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/07/20/day-547/
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#2

This is a big deal…taping of T talking about the payment to Stormy Daniels. So there must be a ton more. :smile:

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Day 546
#4

The world within the alt right battling anti Trump messaging. Very frightening.

Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.”

I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.

When we both publicized some of the racist attacks — I in National Review and Nancy in the Washington Post — things took a far more ominous turn. Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section.

Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.

The next Sunday, friends from church approached, expressing concern not just for our safety but for theirs as well. We live in a community where most of the streets have similar names, and it’s common for UPS drivers, FedEx deliveries, and friends to end up at the wrong house. They interpreted the images as threats, and they didn’t want anyone to drive into our neighborhood, looking for the Frenches, intent on turning image into reality.

It took days — and hundreds of IP blocks and Twitter reports — but things finally calmed down. The racist images slowed from a flood to a trickle, I relaxed a bit at night, and life returned, I thought, to normal. I was wrong. Our “normal” had changed. This wasn’t the beginning of the end of our troubles, but rather the end of the beginning.

I share my family’s story not because we are unique or because our experience is all that extraordinary, but rather because it is depressingly, disturbingly ordinary this campaign season. The formula is simple: Criticize Trump — especially his connection to the alt-right — and the backlash will come.

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#5

Thx…so much incoming right now.

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#7

I really like this new thing @matt :+1: So much has happened since last Friday, it’s good to review.

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#8

:grimacing:

ASPEN, Colo. — Iranian hackers have laid the groundwork to carry out extensive cyberattacks on U.S. and European infrastructure and on private companies, and the U.S. is warning allies, hardening its defenses and weighing a counterattack, say multiple senior U.S. officials.

Despite Iran having positioned cyber weapons to carry out attacks, there is no suggestion an offensive operation is imminent, according to the officials, who requested anonymity in order to speak.

Cyber threats have been a major theme of the 2018 Aspen Security Forum, with administration officials from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all warning of the pervasive danger from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

#10

Staffers are considering accelerating their departures in the wake of the president’s equivocations on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Trump’s disastrous performance since his news conference alongside Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has sent West Wing morale to its lowest level since the Charlottesville fiasco almost a year ago.

As happened last August, when the president refused to condemn neo-Nazi demonstrators, Trump’s attempts to tamp down outrage have backfired. Stilted statements followed by ad-libbed remarks left even his allies feeling that while the president was technically acknowledging a mistake, he actually meant what he’d said on the first go-round — that he believed Putin’s denials of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“People are just depressed,” said one Republican close to the White House. “Nobody wants to take on the public heat of resigning right now, but there are a bunch of people who were thinking maybe they’d leave after the midterms who are very seriously starting to consider accelerating their timetable.”

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#11

Trump’s legal team and close allies are increasingly concerned that the President’s widely panned performance standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week could strengthen the hand of special counsel Robert Mueller at a critical time.

But one source with knowledge of legal team thinking says it’s now legitimate to fear that Trump’s erratic behavior at the Helsinki summit, coupled with last week’s indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officers, could be an inflection point in the whole process – one that could potentially make Trump less sympathetic and conceivably embolden Mueller.

One question being raised inside Trump’s team is whether Mueller is now slow-walking the interview talks as he rolls out indictments, as he did last week against a dozen Russian nationals. The thought is that maybe Mueller wants to show they have more of an established record before moving in any way on Trump.

Another source familiar with the Trump legal discussions told CNN that in the face of this lack of progress, there is also some concern that Mueller could be preparing a subpoena. Previously, Trump’s attorneys have believed that Mueller does not want to get into a protracted legal fight over a subpoena, but now no one seems to know what to anticipate.

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#12

THIS.

We are in the cross hairs of these kinds of threats…serious destabilization for all.

Wow.

#13

Robert Mueller subpoenaed Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madam who went to prison and was connected to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

Davis worked for former Trump aide Roger Stone for a decade, and had numerous interactions with Stone and Andrew Miller – who ran Davis’ campaign for Governor and who was subpoenaed by Mueller a month ago.

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#14

More T sex scandals are going to be discussed on BBC Panorama on Saturday, July 21st. And the BBC has been pursuing these scandals and already aired some reports (alleging there had been underage sex, but there is no evidence for it…)

Brace for more T mis-behavin information…which we know will have little to no effect on his adoring base.

The BBC first ran a 30-minute report dedicated to this notable query on Monday, July 9 – three days before Trump’s visit to England. Titled “Trump: Is the president a sex pest?” it focused on Trump’s relations with women in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, for those of us stateside who would like an answer of our own, the documentary is scheduled to premiere in the US and Canada on Saturday, July 21, at 10:30am EST, with another airing on Sunday afternoon.

The half-hour show features two women and a man who say they witnessed Trump’s behavior at parties in the ’80s and ’90s. One woman, Barbara Pilling — who has never spoken publicly before about Trump — said she met the president at a New York party in the late 1980s, where he questioned her over her age. When she responded 17, the president allegedly responded, “Oh, great. So you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.”

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#15

Foot soldier Mike Pompeo (Sec of State) is falling in line w/ Putin’s appearance this fall. Never ceases to amaze me.

Pompeo ‘hopeful’ Trump-Putin meeting happens in DC

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that he’s “very hopeful” that President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Washington, D.C., this fall.

“Those conversations are incredibly important, we have our senior leaders meeting all across the world with people we have deep disagreements with,” Pompeo told reporters.

“It is incredibly valuable to the people of the United States of America that President Trump and President Putin continue to engage in dialogue to resolve the difficult issues that our countries face between each other,” he said.

"I think this makes enormous sense and I’m very hopeful that that meeting will take place this fall," he said.

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#16

Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are aggressively removing voters from the rolls, the Brennan Center for Justice says.

Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday.

After reviewing voter purges nationally from 2012 to 2016, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the mostly Southern jurisdictions that had once been required to get changes to voting policies pre-approved by the Justice Department had higher rates of purging than jurisdictions that were not previously subject to pre-clearance.

A key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect minority voters from state disenfranchisement, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, allowing states to begin making changes affecting voting without first getting federal approval.


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#17

What’s going on here?! Why do these articles from Bloomberg, Reuters, and NYT not reference the highly suspicious $500 million loan that China made to enable a Trump project just before Trump lifted the sanctions against China’s ZTE?

Doesn’t anyone in the media or in Congress care that Trump may have been paid off for lifting the ZTE sanctions? Nothing has been proven, but the timing is damning – is anyone investigating this? Why are these media outlets (who I normally trust) just ignoring what, on the face of it, could be a massive corruption scandal? Why is everyone in Congress ignoring it? – I can understand that Republicans want to sweep it under the rug, but where are the Democratic voices? It’s really odd that for the past month, this potential scandal has not been mentioned at all by anyone, anywhere. (For example, when I search on the pair of words “ZTE” and “Indonesia,” nothing pops up that is dated within the last month.) Is there something I’m missing?

Yes, Trump and China are now wrangling over tariffs, but couldn’t this “loans-made-for-lifting sanctions” thing be a side deal? Or even something that was being set up before things got ugly on trade?

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#18

Yes…looks and is very suspicious. It appears to be a sleight of hand move, hardly outside the perimeters of the law, but certainly without a moral compass at hand.

I googled ZTE…but within Committee to Investigate Russia and they tend to have hyper specific links to the Russia-T-Collusion etc stories.

I found a story on how Special Counsel wants to interview Ivanka Ivanka and her Int’l ties - Interview wanted

Which lead me to a Wilbur Ross Statement…
Dept of Commerce Wilbur Ross on ZTE’s ban lifted

“While we lifted the ban on ZTE, the Department will remain vigilant as we closely monitor ZTE’s actions to ensure compliance with all U.S. laws and regulations,” said > Secretary Ross. “Three interlocking elements – a suspended denial order, the $400 million in escrow, and a compliance team selected by and answerable to the Department – will allow the Department to protect U.S. national security.”

The $1.4 billion paid under the new settlement agreement are in addition to the $892 million in penalties ZTE has already paid to the U.S government under a March 2017 settlement agreement.

And it looks like the Administration is playing it straight down the line with ZTE has paid off their $1.4 billion, so we’ll lift sanctions, but we’re keeping an eye on it.

And while we’re on Wilbur Ross, he’s a greedy businessman with all sorts of money rolled up on foreign sites and his 'inadvertent errors," on stock trades. Come ON!

In a statement Thursday evening, Mr. Ross said that he had made “inadvertent errors” and would sell all of his equity holdings and place the proceeds in United States Treasury bills “to maintain the public trust.”

And so it goes…grab it while you can.

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#19

On May 16, 2017, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke met with Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican who was the first in Congress to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, according to Zinke’s official calendar.

But Zinke’s calendar doesn’t show who else was in the room – three representatives from a company that does business with the National Park Service.

The meeting is one of about a dozen instances uncovered by CNN of Zinke’s calendar omitting or obscuring important details, leaving the public in the dark about who is meeting with Zinke, one of Trump’s most trusted cabinet officials with a consequential portfolio.

Pruitt was also caught hiding his appointments which, by law, are required to be part of the public record. Gotta keep those pay-for-play meetings secret.

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#20

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Saturday that the release of documents related to the surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser show that Republicans “misrepresented and distorted these applications” in their claims of bias at the Department of Justice.

“These documents affirm that our nation faced a profound counterintelligence threat prior to the 2016 election, and the Department of Justice and FBI took appropriate steps to investigate whether any U.S. persons were acting as an agent of a foreign power,” Schiff said in a statement. “FBI and DOJ would have been negligent had they not used all the tools at their disposal, including Court-authorized FISA surveillance, to protect the country.”

The independent DOJ is protecting our country. Trump wants the Executive branch to run the DOJ. If that ever comes to pass, we will no longer be a democratic republic, but will have become an oligarchy more like Russia than the nation our forefathers founded.

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#21

Straight from T’s bully pulpit and the Roy Cohn playbook - Get out in front, send out intimidating and false information, and repeat. T is always working the court of public opinion, never with the facts.

The searching for Cohen’s papers, tapes and phones was perfectly legal and signed off by a judge who was given compelling reasons for doing so. It is not pillaging or illegal, but T will cast enough doubt to make it seem so.

And always a mention of how unfair this all is…so now is the time for “open warfare on Mr. Cohen.”

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — President Trump lashed out at his longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, on Saturday, suggesting that there could be legal consequences for Mr. Cohen’s decision to record a discussion they had two months before the 2016 election about paying a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

“Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer’s office (early in the morning) — almost unheard of,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client — totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!”

With his tweet, the latest in a week of dizzying statements by a president whose advisers say has become more unwilling than ever to listen to advice, Mr. Trump signaled open warfare on Mr. Cohen, a longtime fixer he had until now tried to keep by his side. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to quash potentially damaging news coverage about Mr. Trump during the campaign.

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#22

If the press is digging this up, Butina meeting with a US Treasury Official and Fed, you have to wonder how deep this dragnet is. Mind boggling.

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#23

Trump’s deranged ALL-CAPS tweet:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

8:24 PM - Jul 22, 2018

I swear Trump is going off the deep end and is going to bring us all down with him. This is not the way to engage in diplomacy – it’s the way to start a war.

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