WTF Community

More Questionable Behavior from Trump, T Admin, DOJ, and R's vs Dems, Press, Justice

Alleged China-Fighter Donald Trump Has Secret Chinese Bank Account

President Trump has spent months insisting Joe Biden is in hoc to China. “China is on a massive disinformation campaign because they are desperate to have Sleepy Joe Biden win the presidential race,” Trump tweeted last spring. “Beijing Biden is so weak on China that the intelligence community recently assessed that the Chinese Communist Party favors Biden,” claimed his son, falsely, this summer. More recently, he has seized upon hacked emails purporting to show financial links between Biden and China.

But Biden does not have financial ties to China. We know this because he released his tax returns. Trump has not released his tax returns. But the New York Times has obtained at least some of them. And they found that Trump has a Chinese bank account, and suggest he has collected earnings from that country while serving as president .

The Chinese bank account belongs to Trump’s subsidiary firm, Trump International Hotels Management. While in previous years the firm has reported small sums, in 2017 — Trump’s first year in office — it reported $17.5 million in revenue, a large spike.

The returns obtained by the Times do not show how much of that money came from China. The Trump Organization refuses to say. But the dealings it found suggest a massive conflict of interest between his foreign policy and his wallet. And while Trump postures angrily against Beijing, threatening to “make them pay” for allowing the coronavirus to infect their country and then the world, somehow, nobody believes he has any way to do this.

The objective of Trump’s stream of charges is meant to muddy the waters and confuse the public with a flurry of identical charges and counter-charges. He called his last opponent corrupt, and he calls his current opponent corrupt. The charge that Biden has secret ties to China, and that China is helping him win, is intended to offset the no-longer-secret relationship between Trump and Russia, which is exerting itself on its behalf with the open cooperation of his lawyer. But now we see the accusation serves a second purpose: it obscures Trump’s own undisclosed financial relationship with China.

2 Likes

The Intelligence Director Who Is Undermining Trust and Truth

John Ratcliffe is breaking norms, which could weaken our defenses.

It’s quite an accomplishment, but in only five months, the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, has already put himself in the running to be considered among the most destructive intelligence officials in U.S. history.

During his confirmation hearing in May, Mr. Ratcliffe testified that he would not allow outside influence to affect his work, claiming that he would be “entirely apolitical” in the position.

Instead, he seems to have jumped into the partisan fray. On Monday, Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to bolster an unconfirmed news report by The New York Post related to the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in the Ukraine. Mr. Ratcliffe suggested on Fox Business that the Obama-Biden administration had committed (unnamed) criminal abuses of power and that voters should take these supposed actions into account in the upcoming election.

Such personal political commentary for a sitting intelligence leader is virtually unprecedented. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, tweeted that Mr. Ratcliffe’s actions were “reprehensible” and worthy of a “tin-pot dictatorship.”

Mr. Ratcliffe had already broken norms by mining and declassifying material that might help President Trump get re-elected. He has controlled how information is shared with congressional Democrats, while supplying select, out-of-context material to those Republicans trying to grasp any shred of evidence that might fit their theory of a deep-state conspiracy to investigate President Trump’s connections to the Kremlin.

While a traitor or mole inside our spy agencies can do tremendous damage, only a deeply partisan intelligence leader can undermine the very system of trust that underpins our intelligence establishment.

During World War II and the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, falsified reports; limited and controlled sources; dismissed reporting by allies, the O.S.S., the C.I.A. and U.S. code breakers; and actively tried to suppress anything that challenged MacArthur’s preconceived views.

As David Halberstam wrote in “The Coldest Winter,” his history of the Korean War, General MacArthur believed it was crucial that “his intelligence reports blend seamlessly with what he had intended to do in the first place. What that meant was that the intelligence that Willoughby was turning over to MacArthur was deliberately prefabricated.”

General MacArthur’s unwillingness to listen to others left the United States and its allies blindsided when the North Korean Army invaded South Korea in June 1950, and again when the Chinese stormed into Korea later that year, leading to one of the worst military defeats of U.S. forces and the longest retreat in U.S. history. General MacArthur even advocated using nuclear weapons to stem the retreat. It wasn’t the failure to collect or analyze intelligence that led to the catastrophe, but the failure of leadership. Maj. Gen. Willoughby shaped intelligence to fit what his master wanted to hear.

Mr. Ratcliffe, like Maj. Gen. Willoughby before him, seems to think his job is to serve only his boss, who requires that everyone agree with him at all times. As General MacArthur is often quoted: if you control intelligence, you control decision-making. Intelligence professionals call this politicization and see it as a poison that can harm national-security decision-making.

We can see today, through Mr. Ratcliffe, just what can happen when the office is politicized.

Rather than operating as an honest steward of the large and important intelligence community, Mr. Ratcliffe appears to regard the nation’s secrets as a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons — sources and methods be damned. Even if the particular material he declassifies is not especially sensitive, the failure to provide proper context, sourcing or background only serves to confuse the public and distract voters.

That may be the point. Creating a fictional narrative for political purposes requires corrupting a system that relies on in-depth, contextual and all-source analysis. However, if you are sending damaging signals to allies, potential sources or even your own officers, it is child’s play to concoct any story you wish by plucking selective details from the millions and millions of pages held by the intelligence agencies.

But exploiting the intelligence community in this manner fundamentally debases it — in ways the American public cannot always see. Hastily considered declassification of selective secret material runs the risk of exposing sources and methods, assisting foreign adversaries and undercutting the trust of our allies. And why would allies or potential sources be willing to share their secrets with intelligence officials who won’t hesitate to publicize their information if they see short-term political benefit? In the end, our defenses are weakened.

In the world of intelligence, credibility is paramount. Our allies and sources must trust us. And policymakers need to trust that intelligence professionals are providing the very best, unbiased analysis. If that bond of trust is breached, and motives and honesty are questioned, the intelligence is worthless. Mr. Ratcliffe and his enablers need to understand that once the credibility of our intelligence community is surrendered, it will be extremely hard to recapture.

John Sipher is a former chief of station for the C.I.A. and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.

2 Likes




3 Likes

Looks like Sen Mitch McConnell took a header…he’s bruised up. Sort of like his shoulder fracture ‘accident’ from 2019.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not answer questions about his health Thursday, only saying there were “no concerns” after reporters asked him about what appeared to be bruises and bandages on his hands in recent days.

“Of course not,” McConnell told reporters in the Capitol when asked if he had any health issues people should know about.

McConnell, who is up for reelection, later said there were “no concerns” when asked directly by CNN about the apparent bruises or if he had any other problems.

The 78-year-old did not respond when asked if he was being treated by a doctor. An aide to McConnell also declined to provide any additional details when asked multiple times about the majority leader’s health.

From 2019

2 Likes

Sen Collines (R-ME) and Sen Murkowski (R-AK) will vote NO on ACB’s nomination moving ahead.
Collins needs to save her seat, so is voting this way for sure.

Block the rest from Sen McConnell (R-KY)

2 Likes

Wall Street Journal’s News Side Releases A Piece Debunking Opinion Side’s Hunter Biden Screed

Just hours after a pro-Trump WSJ columnist accused Hunter of trying to rope his dad into a business deal, the outlet’s reporters said documents revealed “no role for Joe Biden.”

Inside the campaign to ‘pizzagate’ Hunter Biden

Pizzagate-style rumors in 2016 were largely confined to far-right message boards. This year, they are reaching the mainstream with help from a website boosted by Trump.

Some of the same people who pushed a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that first emerged in 2016 are now targeting Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, with similar falsehoods. Their online posts are garnering astronomical numbers of shares on social media.

The fantastical rumors, which NBC News is declining to repeat verbatim, echo specific plot points central to “pizzagate,” a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse.

There is an important difference, however. The pizzagate-style rumors in 2016 were largely confined to far-right message boards like 4chan and parts of Reddit. But the Hunter Biden iteration of the same conspiracy theory took off last weekend with the help of speculation from conservative TV hosts and members of Congress. Their theorizing can be traced back to a new website that has been promoted by President Donald Trump and his surrogates.

The path of the conspiracy theory highlights how once-obscure and fringe claims are now able to reach mainstream conservative media and even elected officials in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The disinformation campaign appears to have been successful in its goal of generating a smear against the former vice president’s son. According to Google Trends, “human trafficking” is now the third-most common related search term for “Hunter Biden” in the last year, after “laptop” and “New York Post,” which point to search interest around the unconfirmed allegations that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden contained evidence of crimes.

The New York Post published an article on Oct. 14 that it said was based on leaked private photos from Hunter Biden’s personal hard drive, including photos that appeared to show the younger Biden sleeping and screenshots of unverified emails claiming that he had used his position on the board of an energy company to set up a meeting with his father, then the vice president. Both Bidens have denied any wrongdoing, with Joe Biden recently calling the allegations a “last-ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family.”

NBC News requested a copy of the hard drive, but Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, who had possession of the hard drive, has yet to respond. The New York Post article did not include any of the child abuse rumors.

But the child abuse conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden that emerged from the fringes of the internet began swirling before the New York Post article and can be traced to associates of former White House aide Steve Bannon. They are now reaching a fever pitch less than two weeks before the election, in which Trump trails Biden in most national and many battleground state polls.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communications and rhetoric at Syracuse University, said that pro-Trump trolls are “playing the hits from 2016” and hoping they stick with voters who didn’t hear the first iteration of the rumor four years ago.

She noted that pushing child abuse conspiracy theories echoes what Bannon has publicly advocated in an effort to alter how voters feel.

“This is gaslighting of the highest order,” Phillips said. “This has been the Steve Bannon playbook this entire time. He has celebrated the strategy of ‘flooding the zone with s—’ — when you confuse people, when you make them angry, when you just sort of throw too many things at them for them to process.”

The re-run of an identical conspiracy theory from 2016, this time with Hunter Biden as the new target, gathered momentum in part because of a new disinformation pipeline promoted by high-profile conservative figures — including the president.

[

Before the Post

](Inside the campaign to 'pizzagate' Hunter Biden)

The earliest mentions of Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced in late September, weeks before the New York Post article was published, according to Zignal Labs, a media intelligence platform that analyzed the social media conversation around recent Hunter Biden rumors for NBC News.

First Draft, a nonprofit that tracks misinformation and provides research and training for journalists, said the child abuse rumors originated from a nexus of pro-Trump figures. The organization is also a training partner of NBC News.

Keenan Chen, a First Draft researcher who has been monitoring the spread of the Hunter Biden rumors, said that they appeared to have originated from Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality known for spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

Wang is connected to Bannon, the 2016 Trump campaign CEO, and Giuliani through Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes. The three men are board members of the Rule of Law Society, a nonprofit with a mission to “expose corruption, obstruction, illegality, brutality, false imprisonment, excessive sentencing, harassment and inhumanity” in China.

Wang did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Guo, who is a member of Trump’s country club Mar-A-Lago and was once the world’s 67th-wealthiest individual, befriended Bannon, a former Trump campaign and White House aide, in 2017, according to The Washington Post. Bannon was arrested by federal agents on Guo’s yacht in September and charged with fraud, tied to an alleged scheme to defraud donors to a social media campaign called We Build the Wall. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to face trial next May.

The most prominent spread of the child abuse rumors involving Hunter Biden before the New York Post article came from Wang, whose Twitter thread of videos has been retweeted 20,000 times.

Twitter and Facebook have both instituted a series of new policies aimed at limiting election misinformation, though Wang’s videos do not necessarily violate those rules.

Wang’s videos picked up more momentum a month later, as conspiracy theorists speculated about what else could be on the hard drives after the New York Post article.

While Delaware authorities have said the hard drive is now in the hands of the FBI, its emergence triggered a wave of conspiratorial thinking that has reached mainstream conservative outlets. But vague rumors about Hunter Biden’s hard drive had already been spreading for a full month.

“Shortly after the New York Post story went online, some members of the QAnon conspiracy theory noticed Wang and his YouTube show, and started amplifying the unfounded pizzagate narrative and making it more visible in English on social media,” Chen said.

According to analysis by the nonpartisan nonprofit Advance Democracy, more than 1 in 10 shares of a tweet from Giuliani about the New York Post article came from accounts that identify with the QAnon conspiracy theory in their Twitter bio.

Just one day after the New York Post article, allegations of wrongdoing against the Bidens involving Ukraine were seemingly abandoned by many Trump allies and conservative media, which turned the focus to claims of China-related corruption, according to Zignal’s analysis. These conversations were dominated by Donald Trump Jr., the president and the actor James Woods.

But the most significant boost for the child abuse conspiracy theories would come from a website founded in May that has been embraced by Trump surrogates: Revolver News.

[

The new Drudge

](Inside the campaign to 'pizzagate' Hunter Biden)

Since the site’s inception in May, Trump and some of his supporters have pointed to Revolver News as an alternative to The Drudge Report, the conservative news aggregation giant whose tone toward the president has shifted to negative and antagonistic since 2019.

Revolver articles flattering to Trump have been shared directly by allies of the White House, and even the president, for months. In September, Trump tweeted an endorsement of Revolver.

“Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 14. “They like REVOLVER and others!”

Revolver News does not disclose on its website who is behind its operations or any corporate affiliations, but Darren Beattie, a former speechwriter for Trump who was fired in 2018 for speaking at an event alongside white nationalists, has claimed authorship of some of the posts on the website. Most articles do not have bylines, and the few names that are on articles appear to be aliases of people that do not appear elsewhere on the internet and could not be identified with public records searches.

In 2019, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a loyal Trump ally, hired Beattie as a speechwriter. Gaetz’s chief of staff, Jillian Lane Wyant, told NBC News on Wednesday that Beattie was no longer with Gaetz’s office. Campaign finance reports show Beattie was on the payroll of Gaetz’s re-election campaign and was paid $10,000 in June.

Beattie declined to comment on his role at Revolver News or the site’s ownership.

Attempts to identify Revolver’s ownership were unsuccessful, but the website shares an internet protocol address (a numerical label given to any computer connected to the internet) with only nine other websites, according to website details that are publicly available. Those websites make up “The Mix,” which describes itself as a “unified publishing network” mostly covering pro wrestling and mixed martial arts.

The Mix is owned by Intermarkets, a digital media and advertising company. Until 2019, Intermarkets was the exclusive advertising representative for The Drudge Report, one of the most visited news sites on the internet.

Revolver, created in May, is now the only politics aggregator hosted on The Mix’s IP address.

Revolver and The Mix sites share a Texas-based web service provider, Precision Creations. Joshua Wychopen, president of Precision Creations, declined to comment on the site’s owner, citing client privacy concerns. Intermarkets denied any relationship with Revolver. Shauna Schatz, Intermarkets’ vice president of media, said that she was unaware of who owned Revolver.

The online news watchdog Newsguard said in a report that Revolver “severely violates basic journalistic standards” and publishes conspiracy theories and misinformation about Covid-19.

On Oct. 15, Revolver published an article that suggested some of the unfounded allegations about Hunter Biden under the byline of Moxie Russo, a name that did not appear elsewhere on the internet based on various web searches and could not be identified in public records. While Beattie declined to comment on whether he had written the Oct. 15 article or subsequent ones from Revolver News detailing the baseless child abuse accusations, but he has promoted the articles from his personal Twitter account.

[

Into the mainstream

](Inside the campaign to 'pizzagate' Hunter Biden)

Shortly thereafter, some conservative media figures and politicians seized on the baseless claims.

Chanel Rion, a correspondent for the conservative cable media outlet One America News Network, claimed​ in a tweet that she had seen content from the hard drive. In the days following, Lauren Witzke, a QAnon-supporting Senate candidate in Delaware, tweeted the child abuse allegations. InfoWars host ​Alex Jones ​amplified similar unfounded claims about Hunter Biden, one version of which has been viewed over 3 million times on InfoWars’ video hosting site.

By the weekend, more mainstream conservative media personalities had seized on the child abuse rumors. On Saturday, Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo suggested in an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that the FBI may be investigating the claims. Bartiromo did not directly refer to Revolver News but discussed details unique to the Revolver News article. Johnson also echoed the suggestion. On Sunday, Wayne Allen Root, a national radio host, echoed some of the claims, receiving more than 25,000 retweets in two hours.

On Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. repeated the accusations during a Fox News appearance.

The claims have also spread far and wide on Facebook, especially on public pages and groups dedicated to the QAnon-linked SaveTheChildren conspiracy theory movement, according to posts viewed by NBC News, using a list maintained by Junkipedia, an organization that monitors misinformation.

Giuliani, who said he has been in possession of the laptop for months, made no similar claims until last week. On Oct. 14, Giuliani said he would start revealing evidence of child abuse over “the next five days” related to the claims but he has yet to do so.

Subsequent appearances by Giuliani on the conservative cable channel Newsmax, including one on Tuesday in which he claimed to have handed over Hunter Biden’s hard drive to the Delaware State Police, have garnered millions of views across online platforms.

Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the absence of evidence, lurid descriptions of Hunter Biden’s allegedly criminal activity were pushed without proof by anonymous users on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan.

While the claims have not been repeated by any mainstream media outlets, that does not mean that they have not had their intended effect. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the goal of the rumors isn’t necessarily to make people believe the claims, but to confuse and disillusion voters into distrusting any piece of information and, in turn, keep them from wanting to vote at all.

“All ‘flooding the zone with s–t’ does is just make reasonable people not want to engage,” said Phillips. “So then the screamers and the people on the far, far, far-right take over the discourse, and then that means no one can have a discourse.”

The latest Q-Anon conspiracy is mainstream: the “Pizzagating” of Hunter Biden by the coalition of Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, right-wing propagandists, Russian disinformation agents, and Chinese dissidents:

1 Like

So there’s that.

For now, Operation Warp Speed, created by the Trump administration to spearhead development of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, is focused on getting vaccines through clinical trials in record time and manufacturing them quickly.

The next job will be to monitor the safety of vaccines once they’re in widespread use. But the administration last year quietly disbanded the office with the expertise for exactly this job, merging it into an office focused on infectious diseases. Its elimination has left that long-term safety effort for coronavirus vaccines fragmented among federal agencies, with no central leadership, experts say.

“We’re behind the eight ball,” said Daniel Salmon, who served as the director of vaccine safety in that office from 2007 to 2012, overseeing coordination during the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. ”We don’t even know who’s in charge.”

2 Likes

Back-channeler Erik Prince, a paid- for mercenary for a lot of America’s wars is profiled. He is a darling of the Dick Cheney’s of the world and also Betsy de Vos’ brother.

‘Blackwater Is Back’ — Erik Prince Wants to Rise Again – Rolling Stone

The failed Project Opus has since become the subject of a United Nations investigation, which includes a detailed and damning portrait in a 61-page report issued in June. This account of the failed operation in Libya is based on that report, which Rolling Stone obtained.

Still, much remains unknown about the mission. Who was putting up the funds to back Haftar’s attempted overthrow? Who was organizing the mission outside of Libya? And who, approached by a group of mercenaries claiming they were supporting “energy development” projects in a war-torn country, was willing to sell deadly weapons into a nation already consumed by violence?

U.N. investigators are struggling to make sense of who was attempting to get Haftar the personnel and equipment for his planned strike. A complex shell of at least 10 companies in four countries “increased the opacity of the procurement operations and attempted to disguise the identity of the overall planners,” the U.N. panel wrote. But when the mercenaries scrambled to find private sellers for the aircraft Jordan wouldn’t provide, they left a trail of clues about how the operation came together. And a lot of those clues point in the direction of Erik Prince.

2 Likes

White House drops an F-bomb on the career civil service with a new program that would let him fire those that anger him.

The White House issued an Executive Order on October 21 creating a new “Schedule F” category of excepted service positions.

These new jobs could replace all career civil service positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating character.”

Basically, it means politicizing a VAST swath of civil service jobs normally kept non-partisan.

‘Stunning’ Executive Order Would Politicize Civil Service

President Trump signs directive that would potentially pull thousands of federal employees in “policy-making” positions out of the competitive service, making them at-will employees.

Trump’s newest executive order could prove one of his most insidious

‘Through this order, President Trump has declared war on the professional civil service by giving himself the authority to fill the government with his political cronies who will pledge their unwavering loyalty to him, not to America’

Trump Orders Shift of Potentially 100K Policy-Related Jobs Out of Competitive Service

Creating a New Class of Federal Employees

Representative Adam Smith, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Condemns Trump EO Establishing Schedule F Appointments to Eliminate Merit-Based Hiring and Permit “At Will” Termination

Here is the executive order… which Joe Biden can overturn once he is elected.

Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service

2 Likes

Kavanaugh cited Gore v Bush. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: :scream: :exploding_head:

Brett Kavanaugh foreshadows how Supreme Court could disrupt vote counting

Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday night set the battle lines for how the Supreme Court should consider post-election lawsuits that could determine the outcome of the presidential race.

As the court rejected a Democratic attempt to allow mail-in votes, postmarked by Election Day, to be received up to six days after the election in Wisconsin, Kavanaugh also suggested that state courts may not have the last word in interpreting state election rules.

“Under the U.S. Constitution, the state courts do not have a blank check to rewrite state election laws for federal elections,” Kavanaugh wrote in a footnote of his concurring opinion.

Kavanaugh’s language overall mirrors President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about calling a winner on election night.

States that require mail-in ballots to be returned by the Election Day, Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion, “want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

But those announcements are in no way official: They are projections made by national broadcast networks and wire services, based on how partial results compare to historical outcomes – not by the states themselves, which typically take weeks before certifying elections.

Republican state legislatures in some states, including Pennsylvania, have blocked efforts to speed up the counting of mail-in ballots on election night. In Pennsylvania, the GOP-led legislature opposed changing policies to allow clerks to begin processing absentee ballots – which have been cast by more Democrats than Republicans there – before November 3. That means they’ll have to open them and verify voters’ eligibility on the day of the election, likely resulting in a slower-than-usual count that steadily builds in Democrats’ favor.

Citing Bush v. Gore

Kavanaugh referenced Bush v. Gore, the court’s opinion that decided the 2000 election along partisan and ideological lines and is still so controversial that it is rarely cited as precedent. He is one of three current justices – along with John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett – who worked on Bush’s side during the legal fight at the time.

Kavanaugh picked up on the reasoning of then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist in a concurrence that only garnered the votes of two other justices – the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas.

“The text of Article II means that the ‘clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail’ and that a state court may not depart from the state election code enacted by the legislature,” Kavanaugh wrote.

In the Wisconsin case Monday, Kavanaugh wrote to explain why he agreed with the court’s 5-3 majority to block a federal district court’s ruling that would have extended the deadline for the receipt of absentee ballots in Wisconsin amidst the pandemic.

Kavanaugh said he thought the district court changed the state’s rules too close to an election and that courts should defer to state legislatures to address health concerns about Covid-19. He said he thought that Wisconsin’s deadline is the same as that of several other states and is “reasonable given the all the circumstances.”

But then he shifted to the role state courts should play. The court has yet to resolve how far can state courts go to change election rules put in place by state legislatures. The court deadlocked on that issue in a recent 4-4 split out of Pennsylvania without explanation.

CNN election law expert Rick Hasen said Kavanaugh’s writing is a major clue.

“The conservatives on the court are going to look very skeptically at any state court rulings that might extend deadlines or change rules for recounts or other post-election activity,” Hasen said.

He noted that the court had split 4-4 on that issue last week and that Barrett could make a difference. Barrett “could side with conservatives in these politically charged cases if she does not recuse herself from participating in them,” he added.

Kavanaugh’s concurrence came down just before Barrett appeared at the White House to be sworn in as Trump’s third nominee. To many, her addition to the court will mark a rightward shift. Roberts, who since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy has at times served as a swing vote, could well be outflanked by the new conservative wing. That could mean, to some, that Kavanaugh serves as the new swing vote at times.

2 Likes

Oh, wait! There’s more…more lavish spending at Trump properties.

The Washington Post: During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties

1 Like

And VT is contesting Kavanaugh’s facts on VT procedures.

2 Likes

WTF

CBS’ Lesley Stahl now has around-the-clock security after she and her family received death threats following her controversial 60 Minutes interview with President Donald Trump. Broadcast on the network Sunday, that interview gained attention in the days leading up to its airing after the president walked out and criticized Stahl publicly on Twitter, stating that the interview was "fake and biased."

According to law enforcement sources and multiple other sources who spoke to TMZ , a death threat call was reported to the Los Angeles Police Department at around 9 a.m. local time on Thursday, Oct. 22. That call, which was made to the home of one of Stahl’s immediate family members on the West Coast, came just two days after the president walked out of the interview and just hours before the White House released 38 minutes of the interview on social media. Although details of that call have not been made available, the threat was directed toward Stahl and her family, and the caller reportedly mentioned something about neo-Nazis.

As a result of the threat, CBS is now said to be providing the 60 Minutes anchor with around-the-clock security**. The network now has guards monitoring the homes of both Stahl and other members of her family. These guards also escort them when they go out into public as a safety precaution.**

The Sunday night segment featured a contentious back-and-forth between Stahl and Trump as the anchor pressed the president on a number of issues, including the coronavirus pandemic, his statements regarding “suburban women,” and his comments regarding “fake news.” It was the latter topic that eventually prompted Trump to walk out of the interview, accusing Stahl of asking his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, “softball” questions while giving him harder ones. Stating, “I think we have enough of an interview here, that’s enough. Let’s go,” Trump left the interview and did not return for a joint interview with Vice President Mike Pence or the scheduled walk around the White House grounds.

2 Likes

Trump Predicts Biden Will Be Assassinated Just Weeks Into His Presidency

If any other citizen spoke these words, they’d be rightly investigated and arrested by the FBI.

Campaigning at one of his Super-spreader Covidpalooza rallies in Lansing, Michigan, Donald Trump gleefully predicted that Joe Biden will be assassinated.

He deludes himself into thinking this is why there is so much talk of the 25th Amendment…because DEMOCRATS need to be prepared for when Biden is “shot” and Kamala Harris ascends to power.

TRUMP: That’s why they’re talking about the 25th Amendment, right? Three weeks. Three weeks in, Joe’s shot! Let’s go, Kamala, you ready? Most liberal person in the Senate. She makes Bernie Sanders look like a serious conservative.

Why isn’t the Secret Service hauling his ass off the stage right then and there? David Corn rightly asks on Twitter, “What nut is going to interpret this as encouragement?”

Damn. Trump is talking about Biden being assassinated weeks into his presidency. What nut is going to interpret this as an encouragement?
pic.twitter.com/TVBKSkfcpB

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) October 27, 2020

After all, he is in the state wherein armed domestic terrorists plotted to kidnap and kill the Democratic (and democratically elected) governor, Gretchen Whitmer. We know Trump is inciting and endorsing violent, illegal uprising in the event he loses.

How is this not the next step? How can anyone brush this kind of talk off? And people in the crowd cackle and cheer.

I’m left speechless after seeing that clip of Donald Trump at his rally. Talking about shooting Joe Biden. Behind the podium with the Presidential Seal. There must be accountability.

— Jay :ocean::us::rainbow_flag::statue_of_liberty: (@FerrazzanoJay) October 27, 2020

@secretservice The Man that you protect, Donald Trump, just referenced Joe Biden being shot three weeks into his role as President. The statement is viral at a rally in Lansing Michigan. God help us all.

— Lori Buckley (@LoriBuckley) October 27, 2020

At his rally in Michigan today, Trump talked about Biden being assassinated weeks into his presidency.

His comments were made three weeks after the FBI announced the arrests of 13 suspects accused of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.

Appalling.

— Aaron Ochs (@AaronOchs) October 27, 2020

:exploding_head:
Just deplorable…

President Trump will open up all 16.7 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades.

As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively-pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.

For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink while providing key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout, Sitka black-tailed deer and myriad other species. It boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees — some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years oldabsorb at least 8 percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined.

While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said in an interview. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.”

While Trump has repeatedly touted his commitment to planting trees through the One Trillion Tree initiative, invoking it as recently as last week, his administration has sought to expand logging in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest throughout his presidency. Federal judges have blocked several of these plans as illegal: Last week, the administration abandoned its appeal of a ruling that struck down a 1.8 million-acre timber sale on the Tongass’s Prince of Wales Island.

Alaska Republicans — including Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is locked in a tight reelection race — lobbied the president to exempt the state from the roadless rule on the grounds that it could help the economy in Alaska’s southeast. Fishing and tourism account for 26 percent of regional employment, according to the Southeast Conference, a regional business group, compared with timber’s 1 percent.

1 Like

Trump Quashed Probe Into Crimes by Bank in Turkey, Which Is Paying Trump

In 2016, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked then-Vice-President Joe Biden to lean on federal prosecutors who were investigating a Turkish bank for financial crimes and to hand over a dissident cleric living in the United States. The requests seemed to be on Biden’s mind when he publicly addressed reporters and piously explained that, in the United States, the justice system doesn’t work like that. “I suspect it’s hard for people to understand that as powerful as my country is, as powerful as Barack Obama is as president, he has no authority under our Constitution to extradite anyone,” Biden explained to reporters. “Only a federal court can do that. Nobody else can do that. If the president were to take this into his own hands, what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers.”

Well, the justice system works like that now.

The New York Times has a comprehensive report on Erdogan’s successful efforts to recruit top Trump administration officials into his corrupt scheme.

Scandals tend to be complicated, especially scandals involving banks. But this one is extremely simple. The basic elements:

  1. The Justice Department was prosecuting financial crimes by a Turkish bank.

  2. Turkey’s president asked President Trump to quash the investigation.

  3. Trump has personally received more than $1 million in payments from business in Turkey while serving as president.

  4. Two attorneys general loyal to Trump, Matthew Whitaker and William Barr, both pressured federal prosecutors to go easy on the Turkish bank.

The Times adds plenty of new detail to the last point, which is yet another blow to anybody who hoped Barr might preserve some shred of respect for the rule of law. “In mid-June 2019, when [Geoffrey] Berman met with Mr. Barr in Washington, the attorney general pushed Mr. Berman to agree to allow the Justice Department to drop charges against the defendants and terminate investigations of other suspected conspirators,” the Times reports. When Barr subsequently fired Berman, who resisted his pressure, Justice Department officials cited his stubbornness on the Turkey case “as a key reason for his removal.”

Biden’s casual assumption in 2016 that granting Erdogan’s wish would automatically result in impeachment is a time-capsule record of the standards of good government that prevailed before Trump blew them to smithereens. In a pre-Trump world, the Turkish bank scandal would destroy a normal presidency.

The misconduct found by the Times is actually much worse than the hypothetical behavior Biden said would lead to impeachment for two reasons. First, it undermines Trump’s own foreign policy. The crimes for which the bank, Halkbank, was being investigated relate to violating American sanctions on Iran. After the Obama administration relaxed sanctions on Iran as part of a nuclear deal, the Trump administration ramped up those sanctions and used them as the lynchpin of its strategy in the region. (This helps explain why national security adviser John Bolton, an Iran Über -hawk, was motivated to blow the whistle on this corruption.)

Now, you don’t have to agree with the administration’s agenda of pressuring Iran. I certainly don’t. The point is that the fact that it undermined its own policy agenda highlights the extent of the corruption.

And second, Trump’s own financial interest is a factor Biden did not imagine in 2016. When Trump was asked about Turkey in 2015, he conceded that he had a conflict of interest. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Breitbart. “It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. … And I’ve gotten to know Turkey very well. They’re amazing people. They’re incredible people. They have a strong leader.”

Yes, having a lucrative business deal in a foreign country, especially an oligarchy where leaders intermingle official favors with foreign policy, is a deep conflict of interest. It’s fundamentally disqualifying, in fact.

If Trump wins reelection, the House should launch impeachment hearings.

2 Likes

From Glenn Kirschner

Watch “Judge Emmet Sullivan Issues Order Rescinding all Louis DeJoy USPS Mail-Slowing Policies” on YouTube

2 Likes

Big Grifter…Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, an enormously wealthy man has never severed ties with Chinese businesses throughout his time as a Commerce Secretary. He’s had other ties to banks and runs-ins with SEC, didn’t pass his Financial DIsclosure statement within the WH. He’s probably most known for his adding the question on the Census that asks people on the Census questionnaire if they were US Citizens, which is not legal.

Couldn’t happen to a richer guy.

(This has a paywall)

Wilbur Ross, an investor-turned-U.S. commerce secretary, has long been accused of ethical violations because of his failure to extricate himself from his business ties. Documents obtained by Foreign Policy show that Ross’s potential conflicts of interest around Chinese business are greater than previously known.

In Chinese corporate documents obtained by Foreign Policy , Ross is listed as serving on the board of a Chinese joint venture until January 2019—nearly two years into his term as commerce secretary. That joint venture, now called Huaneng Invesco WLR (Beijing) Investment Fund Management Co., is an investment partnership formed in September 2008 between Huaneng Capital Services, the U.S. management company Invesco, and a firm Ross founded, WL Ross & Co. Huaneng Capital Services is an arm of China Huaneng Group, a major state-owned power producer.

The documents correspond to the information found on Chinese corporate data sites, such as Qichacha and Qixinbao, including the dates of board membership. The documents don’t say if Ross was paid for his board seat or whether there is any current financial relationship between Ross and the joint venture. It’s also unclear if Ross knew that he remained on the board seat: The more recent documents don’t include the signatures or seals of the individual board members. That Chinese documents state Ross was on the board of a Chinese joint venture until 2019 has not been previously reported.

The U.S.-China trade war started heating up in the summer of 2018, as Beijing and Washington levied increasingly onerous tariffs on each other. At the same time as Ross was overseeing the trade war as U.S. commerce secretary, he was still, according to the paperwork, on the board of a joint venture that was a partnership with a Chinese state-owned firm. “Instead of reporting on well-documented facts, including a dated and signed letter of resignation that I provided them, Foreign Policy Magazine is purporting a false narrative that I remained on the board of a Chinese company, citing Chinese documentation,” Ross replied in a statement sent by the U.S. Commerce Department. “It is clear which foreign policies Foreign Policy Magazine actually support and the American public deserves better.”

The letter that Ross provided to Foreign Policy is dated Feb. 27, 2017, marked “Confidential,” and has as its subject line “Re: Resignation from WLR Entities.” In the letter, addressed to WL Ross & Co., Ross writes that he “shall be deemed to have retired, resigned or withdrawn” from every entity affiliated with WL Ross & Co. Ross lists dozens of companies that he claims the letter applies to, including those affiliated with Huaneng. But Chinese corporate law experts consulted by Foreign Policy say that under Chinese law, writing a private letter to a U.S. parent company does not remove one from Chinese corporate boards.

But Chinese corporate law experts consulted by Foreign Policy say that under Chinese law, writing a private letter to a U.S. parent company does not remove one from Chinese corporate boards.
(Invesco, which owns WL Ross & Co., declined to comment for this story.) “The failure to withdraw from the board may have just been an inadvertent slip, but what you said is clearly not a ‘false narrative,’” said Fred Rocafort, an attorney at the international law firm Harris Bricken. “Chinese corporate records establish, without a doubt, that he was officially on the board until February 1, 2019.”

Ross’s position as commerce secretary allowed him to influence the direction of the U.S.-China trade war and America’s global trade policies. While there is no evidence that Ross directly benefited from the joint venture while serving as commerce secretary, entanglements like this have traditionally been seen as potential violations of the national interest. “Public trust demands that all employees act in the public’s interest, and are free from any actual or perceived conflicts when fulfilling the governmental responsibilities entrusted to them,” the then-acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics wrote to Ross in a July 2018 letter, about other inadvertent ethical violations.

On March 20, 2017, less than a month after Ross was confirmed as commerce secretary, the joint venture entered into a partnership with the parent company Huaneng and Taikang Assets Management Co., a subsidiary of the major Chinese insurance firm Taikang. The companies agreed to raise 5 billion RMB ($745 million) to invest in renewable energy projects—a market that Ross had influence over at the Commerce Department and which was directly affected by trade tariffs. Ross’s relationship to the Taikang partnership has not been previously reported. (Taikang Assets and Huaneng didn’t respond to requests for comment. A representative of the Huaneng joint venture, Catherine Han, didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

One set of documents that Foreign Policy obtained, dated March 2018, show that the joint venture filed paperwork stating which of its previous board members would continue to serve on the board. Ross’s name is on that list. Another document, from January 2019, removes Ross from the board and appoints the investor Nadim Qureshi as a new board member. Qureshi served on the board until September 2020. (At the time, Qureshi was a managing partner at WL Ross & Co., according to his LinkedIn profile; he didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The joint venture affixed its seal to the document. Under Chinese law, a seal is generally seen as more official than a signature.

Ross attended a board meeting in September 2012 and signed an agreement with other directors to, among other changes, increase the company’s registered capital to 170 million RMB ($25 million) and its total investment to 510 million RMB ($76 million) and to change the name of the joint venture from Huaneng Invesco WLR Investment Consulting Co. to its current name.

Long bullish about investing in China, Ross and his firm WL Ross & Co., along with Invesco, formed the joint venture to “tap into private equity investments in power generation in China,” the firm said in a 2008 press release. In 2000, Ross founded the private equity firm WL Ross & Co., which focused on distressed assets. He sold the firm to the money manager Amvescap (now Invesco) in 2006.

Ross continued serving as the CEO of Invesco’s private equity groups until joining the government in February 2017. But Ross only sold his shares in Invesco in December 2017—nearly a year into his tenure as commerce secretary. He was supposed to sell his shares, valued between $10 million and $50 million, before the end of May 2017. But the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity found that, because Invesco’s stock rose in the meantime, the delay netted Ross between $1.2 million and $6 million. “I discovered that the previously held stock had not been sold. I then promptly sold these shares,” he later wrote in a disclosure.

2 Likes

Trump Caves To Foreign Influence That Biden Rejected | All In

A look at how Trump gave Erdogan and Turkey what they wanted, shutting down a massive corruption investigation that may have lead to the Kurdish genocide in Syria later.

2 Likes