Comments from NBC reporter Kasie Hunt
#JudgeRobertsProDACA&LGBTrights
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Portrait of a PresidentFormer White House Ethics Chief Reveals ‘Disturbing’ Ivanka Trump Emails
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/walter-shaub-ivanka-trump-080308759.html
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Trump’s latest top Pentagon pick turns out to be a racist Obama-hating conspiracy theorist
Democrats on key Senate committee oppose top Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge
Top Pentagon policy nominee has a history of Islamophobic and offensive comments
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Good title for recounting what Bolton is up to…EPIC SCORE SETTLING. Kelly comes out unscathed…
John Bolton’s Epic Score-Settling | The New Yorker
John Bolton was not looking to make friends in the Trump White House when he served as the national-security adviser, nor did he do so. Bolton’s disdain for his colleagues in the Administration announces itself early and often in his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” which is due out Tuesday, pending the outcome of a legal battle with Trump’s Justice Department. Bolton mocks, disparages, or clashes with Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and others, all within the book’s first hundred pages. By the end of the nearly five-hundred-page book, Bolton also criticizes Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, the entire White House economic team, many of his foreign counterparts, and, although he shares their misgivings about Trump, the House Democrats who impeached the President.
This is Washington score-settling on an epic scale. Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, “had no idea what he was talking about.” Haley, who served as the Ambassador to the United Nations, is a self-promoting pol who sucked up to Trump’s family. Mattis, the former Defense Secretary, is a bureaucratic obstructionist who deluded himself into thinking that an “axis of adults” could manage the unmanageable President. Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who would emerge as the great internal enemy during Bolton’s seventeen-month tenure, is an untruthful hypocrite who flatters Trump to his face while dumping on him privately. “He is so full of shit,” Pompeo writes of the President in a note to Bolton while they are in a conference room in Singapore, listening to Trump exchange frothy compliments and unrealistic denuclearization plans with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. After that summit, Pompeo told a Principals Committee meeting in the White House that Trump’s nuclear diplomacy with North Korea had “zero probability of success.” Later, after a G-20 meeting, Pompeo told Bolton that Trump was always causing problems: “You can’t leave him alone for a minute.”
One of the few other senior advisers to Trump with whom Bolton did not openly clash was John Kelly, perhaps because they both shared an outsized disdain for the President. Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as the second of Trump’s four-and-counting White House chiefs of staff, sat Bolton down to brief him a couple of days before Bolton’s first day on the job, in the spring of 2018. Trump swears and speaks to his staff in “rough language,” Kelly cautioned Bolton. Trump routinely attacks the two previous Republican Presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and despises those who served in their Administrations, as Bolton did. Trump changes his mind “constantly,” Kelly said. Bolton was nothing if not forewarned. Two years and two months after that conversation, Bolton has come forward to say in public what Kelly told him privately that day—and much more. The ultimate score-settling in the book is not with Pompeo or Mnuchin. It is with Donald Trump, a man so corrupt and profoundly unsuited for the Presidency that his own national-security adviser, a lifelong Republican with unimpeachable partisan credentials, came to believe he adopted “obstruction of justice as a way of life.”
Of course, many will—and already have—objected to the book on the grounds that Bolton is a greedy and opportunistic hypocrite, who took a reported two million dollars from Simon & Schuster for writing the memoir but did not testify before Congress about allegations contained within it during the House impeachment hearings and Senate trial of Trump. Bolton should have been a key witness, given that the proceedings concerned Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine to launch politically motivated investigations of the Biden family. Bolton’s staff testified that he called Trump’s scheme an inappropriate “drug deal,” and Bolton confirms in the book that he heard from the President himself about his quid-pro-quo withholding of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. With such explosive information, Bolton’s failure to speak out remains largely unexplained, or at least not convincingly explained, in the memoir. The book does, however, amply confirm Bolton’s reputation as a fierce infighter with an inflated view of himself and a willingness to blame others for just about everything. He is clearly a flawed narrator and colleague—let’s stipulate that. As for the book itself, the reviewer at the Times has already weighed in on its merits as a piece of writing. Twitter, meanwhile, seems to be taking care of Bolton’s merits as a human being. The many failings of Bolton are the one thing that Adam Schiff and Trump agree on. Schiff, who led the impeachment inquiry that Bolton refused to help, called him an author but “no patriot.” Trump, in a series of post-midnight tweets early on Thursday, called him “a disgruntled boring fool,” a “wacko,” “incompetent” “dope” who “never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped.”
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Schiff blasts Bolton for not testifying after release of excerpts
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Bolton lawyers call DOJ attempt to halt book’s publication ‘surreal’ — and too late
But Bolton argues the effort is a naked attempt to prevent him from revealing embarrassing information about President Donald Trump and that, at any rate, it’s much too late: some 200,000 copies of the book have been bound and shipped to booksellers, and nearly every major media outlet in the United States has a copy.
“The Government cannot plausibly argue that Ambassador Bolton has power to stop the Amazon delivery trucks in America, unshelve the copies in Europe, commandeer the copies in Canada, and repossess the copies sent to reviewers or in the possession of major newspapers,” Bolton’s lawyers argue.
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DisguisedSorrowfulIlladopsis-size_restricted.gif
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Cross-posting 
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Um… hold on to your hats.
Whoa.
BREAKING: MSNBC is reporting he is not resigning and staying put because he is protecting evidence and investigations against Trump and associates.
Trump administration in standoff with Manhattan U.S. attorney
The Trump administration announced Friday night that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who has handled a number of investigations involving the president or his campaign, will be leaving that job, though Berman fired back that he hadn’t resigned and would stay on to ensure his office’s cases proceed unimpeded.
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Is this our Friday Night Massacre - aka Nixon era?
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Continued
Trump fires US Attorney for Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, but he has ‘no intention of resigning’ - ABC News
4.
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More information on what and who Berman has dug into in terms of those who might be close to T. These are how Berman must have pissed off both Trump and Barr his henchman.
-Michael Cohen - campaign finance crimes
-Giuliani’s dealings- acting as a foreign agent and business dealings
-Lev Parnas & Igor Fruman - associates of Giuliani and tied the Ukraine Impeachment (fall guys it was speculated)
- Halkbank violating US Sanctions against Iran to get to imprisoned American pastor freed in Turkey and links to T who said he would help Erdogan get rid of these investigations (Bolton’s book)
- Went after T’s inaugural committees with subpoenas and illegal contributions
- Berman went after “ardent Trump Supporter Rep Chris Collins” on insider trading
- Berman brought charges against Avenatti (Stormy Daniel’s twisted lawyer)
FILE - In this Oct. 26, 2018, file photo, Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington. Berman, who oversaw key prosecutions of allies of President Donald Trump and an investigation into Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is resigning. Attorney General William Barr said Friday, June 19, 2020, that Trump intends to nominate Jay Clayton, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the post. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
](https://apnews.com/56faebddd07e5fc3b349e3e3e30453b2/gallery/a18d61b1d3664a11844fa0157bc6dc6c)WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department moved abruptly Friday to oust Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan overseeing key prosecutions of President Donald Trump’s allies and an investigation of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. But Berman said he was refusing to leave his post and his ongoing investigations would continue.
“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Berman said. His statement came hours Attorney General Bill Barr said Berman was stepping down from his position.
The standoff set off an extraordinary clash between the Justice Department and one of the nation’s top districts, which has tried major mob and terror cases over the years. It is also likely to deepen tensions between the Justice Department and congressional Democrats who have pointedly accused Barr of politicizing the agency and acting more like Trump’s personal lawyer than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
The move to oust Berman came days after allegations surfaced from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton that the president sought to interfere in an Southern District investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank in an effort to cut deals with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Barr offered no explanation for the move in the statement he issued late Friday. The White House quickly announced that Trump was nominating the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission to the job, a lawyer with virtually no experience as a federal prosecutor.
Hours later, Berman issued his own statement saying he had learned that he was being pushed out through media report. He vowed to stay on the job until a Trump nominee is confirmed by the Senate. The investigations he oversees will continue, he said.
Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating Giuliani’s business dealings, including whether he failed to register as a foreign agent, according to people familiar with the probe. The people were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The office has also prosecuted a number of Trump associates, including Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who served a prison sentence for lying to Congress and campaign finance crimes.
Berman has also overseen the prosecution of two Florida businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were associates of Giuliani and tied to the Ukraine impeachment investigation. The men were charged in October with federal campaign finance violations, including hiding the origin of a $325,000 donation to a group supporting Trump’s reelection.
Bolton’s tell-all, excerpts of which were posted by the news media this week, included details on how Trump sought to cut a deal to halt SDNY’s investigation into whether Halkbank violated U.S. sanctions against Iran in order to free an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey. Six weeks after the pastor’s release, Bolton writes that on a call with Erdoğan, “Trump then told Erdoğan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.” The episode occurred months after Berman assumed the role of U.S. attorney.
A Republican who contributed to the president’s election campaign, Berman worked for the same law firm as Giuliani and was put in his job by the Trump administration. But as U.S. attorney, he won over some skeptics after he went after Trump allies.
Berman was appointed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January 2018, months after Bharara was fired after refusing to resign along with dozens of other federal prosecutors appointed by President Barack Obama.
Three months later, FBI agents raided Cohen’s offices, an act the president decried as a politically motivated witch hunt.
The following April, in the absence of a formal nomination by Trump, the judges in Manhattan federal court voted to appoint Berman to the position permanently. He has taken a direct hand in other investigations that have angered Trump.
His office subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee for a wide range of documents as part of an investigation into various potential crimes, including possible illegal contributions from foreigners to inaugural events.
And weeks before the 2018 midterm election, Berman announced insider trading charges against an ardent Trump supporter, Republican Rep. Chris Collins. Collins, who represented western New York, has since resigned.
Under Berman’s tenure, his office also brought charges against Michael Avenatti, the combative lawyer who gained fame by representing porn actress Stormy Daniels in lawsuits involving Trump. Avenatti was convicted in February of trying to extort Nike after prosecutors said he threatened to use his media access to hurt Nike’s reputation and stock price unless the sportswear giant paid him up to $25 million.
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