Saturday, October 31, 2020
Final days of desperation
North Carolina:
UPDATE: The Texas GOP responds:
Texas:
I am not providing a link to that, because it's on Despicable Donald Trump's Twitter account.
I think it's as much about trying to start riots as it is voter intimidation.
UPDATE: Trump v. FBI
Jesus Christ
Barr helped create this monster. And I'm afraid it will be with us for years to come. The best to hope for is Trump to move to a private island and take all his cult with him. Maybe an island on the moon.
Even when Trump leaves, he'll be stirring shit, grifting, and soaking taxpayers until he dies
Don't read this if you're trying to focus on the positive possibilities with a Biden presidency.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
You can take it to the bank.rump, unloved by his father, has spent his entire life craving public adulation and attention and possesses a unique—almost algorithmic—understanding of how to maximize the spotlight shining on himself. Almost everyone agrees he seems likely to want to remain in the public eye—setting up a novel circumstance where a new president might assume office while being critiqued publicly minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour by his predecessor.
Politico
And that's probably where he can do the most damage to Biden's presidency. I hope Biden understands that.As he leaves office, Trump would have the chance to decide how and where to set up his post-presidential life—and where to direct a spigot of taxpayer dollars that will continue to flow to him for the rest of his life. Former presidents are eligible for a range of taxpayer-paid benefits, including a roughly $200,000-a-year pension for life, about a million dollars a year for travel and office expenses, and so-called franking privileges, the ability to send mail postage-free. The law does stipulate that such offices have to be inside the U.S., so that would prohibit Trump from using the funds to set up his office in, say, a nonextradition country.
Trump would even have the right to use a special government-owned townhouse on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, reserved exclusively for former presidents visiting Washington, although it seems hard to imagine Trump forgoing the chance to stay in his own hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue.
He’ll also inform the Secret Service what homes and offices he’ll want secured on an ongoing basis as a former president. Unlike other former presidents, Trump could presumably direct much of the spending intended to protect him back to his own properties and own businesses, just as he’s done while in office—charging the Secret Service $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster golf course, $650 a night for his room at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and even $130,000-a-month for the military to run a command center out of Trump Tower in New York, a place he’s rarely visited at all as president. The Secret Service even paid $179,000 to rent golf carts and other vehicles this summer at his New Jersey resort.
Where Trump will set up “home” is an open question: He moved his voting residence from New York to Florida last year—so it seems unlikely he’ll return to set down roots in Manhattan—but in converting the 17-acre Mar-a-Lago into a private club, he agreed years ago that he couldn’t live there year-round and the club closes for the unpleasant Florida summer, so he’ll have to find a second home elsewhere. If he declares that he’ll be living permanently at some combination of Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service might well be paying millions of dollars to the Trump Organization for years to come.
[...]
Trump’s ambitions for his library seem likely to exceed past imagination; presidential libraries and their associated centers usually are arranged as nonprofits or have related foundations that support the government-paid work of the National Archives and Records Administration, which technically runs the library and archives. Most see a few hundred thousand visitors a year.
“As a matter of ego, you can imagine why it would be in his nature to have it be the biggest, largest, goldest and most visited presidential library—more theme park than library.”
[...]
Trump could easily re-imagine the very essence of such an endeavor, turning his presidential library into a for-profit arm of the Trump Organization that becomes a mecca for his devoted MAGA fans the country (and world) over—a “Trumpland” Florida tourist attraction to rival Disney, SeaWorld or Universal Studios, complete with regular guest appearances from his family members, live broadcasts from Trump’s own media endeavors and no shortage of Trump-branded merchandise.
[...]
A grand undertaking like a presidential library might also allow some opportunity for self-dealing—think Trump choosing to put his library on land he already owns and then overpaying himself for it—and given the Trump family’s propensity for misdirecting charitable funds and the bizarre ways that tens of millions of dollars disappeared into his overfunded inaugural and reelection campaign funds, fundraising for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library would seem to present a unique opportunity for further enrichment or payments to family members.
[...]
It’s not hard to imagine similar—and worse—disputes arising between professional archivists and historians and Trump loyalists over how the “Russia Coup” and the “perfect” Ukraine call will be portrayed in official history, not to mention Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic—all another reason that Trump may abandon the traditional model to tell his own story in his own way.
[...]
“He should go where his genius takes him,” says one expert. “He’s a genius about attention. Where is that most easily monetized? He’s a man in constant need for attention and exceptionally good at commanding and holding it.” Rumors have long circulated that the Trump family would try to build its own media empire.
But many around Trump doubt that’s where his ambitions truly lie. Starting a media company would be tremendous work and capital intensive, and unless he was set up as the front man for deep-pocketed investors willing to do the heavy lifting, it hardly seems like the type of project a man who spent nearly a year of his presidency golfing would take up.
[...]
“Whatever he does, he’ll be a bad actor in the media environment,” says one political observer. “Even if the Republican Party abandons him and says ‘Trump who?’ he still has enormous reach to people who are disaffected and violent. ‘Stand back and stand by.’ I’d imagine he’d want to stay public in the same way he did with birtherism—but dialed up a notch. He wants to be relevant. He’s been very successful creating this dark and chaotic political environment. That makes him powerful even if he’s not holding office.”
[...]
“It’s Rudy on steroids in terms of introducing disinformation.”
[...]
The simple truth is that six-figure speaking gigs probably wouldn’t get Trump where he needs to be financially; the Trump Organization will need to be prioritizing seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure business deals. As Trump surveys his earning opportunities, it seems almost certain that—as troubling and stubborn as he may prove in domestic politics—his real chance to upend presidential tradition and American government lies overseas, the place where his richest business deals are likely to go down, too.
[...]
Once he leaves office, there’s nothing to stop him from entering into lucrative and questionable business deals the world over—and he’d likely find a certain type of country or company all too eager to engage with him. “His mischief is much more international than national as an ex,” says a former senior Trump administration official. “There’s nothing [about leaving office] that diminishes his utility as an instrument of a foreign power.”
This should be a major concern. He may not have been paying MUCH attention during his daily briefings, but I think it's a given that if there was anything in them that he may have seen as something that would profit him, he filed it away.Look for Trump to be wooed not by the nation’s top adversaries or allies, but instead by the secondary and tertiary global powers who want the imprimatur of U.S. recognition and respect and are willing to roll out the red carpet for state-visitlike celebrations, perhaps all under the guises of fancy ribbon-cuttings of new Trump-branded projects.
Intelligence professionals can envision, for instance, Trump standing on the world stage alongside his favorite global strongmen—say Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—bragging about his new joint development deals and the world leaders willing to host him even as they reject entreaties from President Biden. Think “Trump Tower Damascus will be a new start for my peace-loving friend Bashar al-Assad.” Or even imagine Trump, Rodman-style, turning up courtside at North Korean basketball games with his buddy Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, just as Joe Biden turns up the pressure on the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear program.
[...]
“Undermining our will, effectiveness and attempts to reassert our values and effectiveness? He’d be 100 percent willing to mess with that 100 percent for personal gain and continued notoriety,” says a former Trump administration official. “Imagine you don’t have Jimmy Carter out there doing your bidding, you have Donald Trump sitting down with these guys and offering them a stage to sell themselves.”
[...]
“He could become the best friend, underminer, impediment to reestablishing any kind of normalized relationships the United States seeks in the future. He’s able to be there offering a different perspective. You’ve now created in him a negative-pressure relief valve,” says the former Trump administration official.
[...]
Most helpful to America’s adversaries overseas, though, would be that Trump’s ongoing tweeting and public appearances would simply serve as a constant reminder of America’s political instability.
[...]
There does not appear to be anything beyond a sense of patriotism that would stop a former president from offering up the nation’s geopolitical, surveillance and intelligence secrets to the highest bidder and signing, say, a $10 million-a-month consulting deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—a regime Trump has assiduously courted in office while brushing aside its most egregious actions, like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In certain ways, he could even use his final weeks and months in office to aid certain foreign countries that promise to pay him or his company later.
[...]
[I]ntelligence leaders and officers who have been around him in the White House doubt he’s paid enough attention to details or retained enough information to be that useful in turning over secrets. “He really doesn’t know that much,” says the former Trump official. “I don’t really believe he’s got the depth of knowledge to go explain to a foreign power the level of penetration that the NSA has gotten into various systems. I don’t think he can undermine the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence. He doesn’t know enough with enough fidelity to be actually destructive.”
[...]
“In the 8-year-old kid that inhabits him, the things that would stick with him are details that he would think are neat or powerful,” assesses one former counterintelligence officer.
No shit.As president, Trump has surely learned secrets worth literally trillions of dollars—information about U.S. espionage capabilities, intelligence assets on earth and in outer space and nuclear and war plans, as well as the quirks, perversions and predilections of leaders and politicians the world over. Normally, former presidents have remained tight-lipped about these secrets after leaving office, but that’s more about tradition, integrity and their own sense of duty than it is about the law. It would pose an uncertain legal question whether such freedom to share secrets continues on post-presidency. While the technical answer would almost certainly be “no,” the sensitivity of prosecuting a former president would make the bar enormously high—and presumably require a deeply egregious (and known) violation of government secrecy to even consider any action.
[...]
As a former intelligence leader says, “His ability to lobby for the Saudi nuclear deals or Goya beans, if it’s got a dollar sign attached, he’ll try for it.”
[...]
Trump’s ascendency since 2016 has dramatically rearranged the ranks of the Republican Party in Washington and nationally; roughly half of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 at the start of his term are already gone or retiring. Any sort of broad loss on Tuesday would further wash away the very swing districts and candidates most inclined to move beyond Trump, leaving just the most solidly Republican districts—GOP areas where Trump’s approval ratings remain sky high and whose representatives would conceivably be the last to risk abandoning him. Republican candidates even far down the ballot are competing over who loves Trump more, and Trump’s scattershot approach to policymaking and betrayal of long-held conservative beliefs means the only ideology that unifies his party today is adulation of him (and, perhaps, the QAnon conspiracy theory).
[...]
In that sense, it’s possible that the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race would actually be the most MAGA-friendly GOP primaries yet, conducted almost entirely on a stage designed by Trump himself, with supplicants parading through Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and an entire generation of GOP stars molded in his image. And that’s even before considering the Trump family’s direct influence—say a titanic Ivanka vs. AOC campaign in New York for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2022 or Donald Jr.’s campaign for Congress (or even the presidency) in 2024, as he becomes the next-generation MAGA standard-bearer.
[...]
When Kate Andersen Brower interviewed Trump in the Oval Office for her new book on former presidents, Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump, he fully admitted he expects to be ostracized by his predecessors. “I don’t think I’ll fit in very well,” he told her. “I’m a different kind of president.”
Not enough.[I]t’s hard to imagine him hitting the state-funeral circuit as a former president. Nor does it seem likely that he’ll pursue humanitarian projects, akin to the Carter Center or the Clinton Foundation, or invest his time in mentoring future generations of leaders and Americans, as the Obamas do, or tending privately to causes like wounded warriors, as George W. Bush does.
[...]
Whenever—and if ever—Trump becomes a former president, he will pursue the job just as he’s pursued being president itself: On his terms, answering only to himself and keeping his own counsel, reinventing almost every aspect of what Americans think of the office and its traditions. As Brower says, “President Trump is an island.”
[...]
What if Trump wakes up each day attempting to explicitly—not just passively—undermine a Biden domestic policy at home and foreign policy overseas? He could go as far as even appointing his own “shadow cabinet,” fundraising off his aggrieved fan base as they underwrite his most loyal aides like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who would also be out of office alongside Trump and casting about for how to chart their own political futures. They could hold their own political meetings, press conferences and appear every night on Fox News to stir the national political pot.
Rather than being able to focus on combating the pandemic and restarting the economy, Biden could find himself consumed on a daily basis by responding and batting away Trump’s latest conspiracies and complaints, and the nation consumed by an unprecedented roiling, low-grade political insurgency unlike anything the country has ever experienced. One open question, though, is how much hold does a defeated Trump end up having on the nation’s attention as time goes by? What seems wild on January 21 might become background noise by late February. As one media expert said to me: “The question is how much people stop listening to him?”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Winning over the medical community
Every rally bleeds a little more support.The American Medical Association (AMA) on Friday issued a scathing statement condemning President Trump’s claim that doctors are purposefully inflating coronavirus case numbers, calling the suggestion “malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided.”
Trump, while speaking at a rally in Waterford Township, Mich., on Friday, argued without evidence that doctors are improperly counting coronavirus deaths for monetary gain.
"Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say 'I'm sorry but everybody dies of COVID,'" he said.
Trump argued that other countries put less of an emphasis on COVID-19 as a cause of death compared to the U.S., adding, "with us, when in doubt, 'choose COVID.' It's true."
[...]
"In Germany and other places, if you have a heart attack, or if you have cancer, you're terminally ill, you catch COVID, they say you die of cancer, you died of heart attack. With us, when in doubt 'choose COVID.' It's true, no, it's true. Now they'll say 'oh that's terrible what he said,' but that's true. It's like $2,000 more so you get more money," Trump said.
[...]
Trump pushed a similar claim during a rally in Wisconsin last weekend, saying "doctors get more money and hospitals get more money" if COVID-19 is listed as a cause of death.
[...]
"The suggestion that doctors—in the midst of a public health crisis—are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” [Susan Bailey, the president of the AMA,] said in a statement Friday without directly naming the president.
[...]
"Rather than attacking us and lobbing baseless charges at physicians, our leaders should be following the science and urging adherence to the public health steps we know work—wearing a mask, washing hands and practicing physical distancing,” Bailey concluded in her statement.
The Hill
He's unfit for anything.
Keeping you in the dark
As coronavirus cases rise swiftly around the country, surpassing both the spring and summer surges, health officials brace for a coming wave of hospitalizations and deaths. Knowing which hospitals in which communities are reaching capacity could be key to an effective response to the growing crisis. That information is gathered by the federal government — but not shared openly with the public.
NPR has obtained documents that give a snapshot of data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services collects and analyzes daily. The documents — reports sent to agency staffers — highlight trends in hospitalizations and pinpoint cities nearing full hospital capacity and facilities under stress.
[...]
Withholding this information from the public and the research community is a missed opportunity to help prevent outbreaks and even save lives, say public health and data experts who reviewed the documents for NPR.
[...]
For instance, the most recent report obtained by NPR, dated Oct 27, lists cities where hospitals are filling up, including the metro areas of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore, where in-patient hospital beds are over 80% full. It also lists specific hospitals reaching max capacity, including facilities in Tampa, Birmingham and New York that are at over 95% ICU capacity and at risk of running out of intensive care beds.
In reviewing the analysis obtained by NPR, Panchadsaram says the local and hospital-level data HHS is collecting would be very useful to researchers and health leaders. "That stuff isn't easy to find at a national level," he says. "There's no one place [publicly] you can go to get all that data."
Hospitalization data is invaluable in looking ahead to see where and when outbreaks are getting worse, says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. "Right now, as we head into the fall and winter surge," Murray says, "we're trying to put more emphasis on predicting where systems will be overwhelmed."
NPR
It's not an afterthought. It's a Trump administration ploy.Without a larger view into national or regional data, some states — like Tennessee, which has eight bordering states — are missing out on valuable regional data, says Melissa McPheeters, who directs the Center for Improving the Public's Health through Informatics at Vanderbilt University.
"Hospitals in Tennessee serve patients who are from Arkansas and Mississippi and Kentucky and Georgia and vice versa, and so we're a little bit blind to what's going on there," she says. "When we see hospitals that are particularly near those state borders having increases, one of the things we can't tell is: Is that because hospitals in an adjacent state are full? What's going on there? And that could be a really important piece of the picture."
[...]
This kind of visibility into data could help policymakers decide how best to curb the spread of the virus.
[...]
It could influence behavior among the public, says Lee. "The neighborhood data, the county data and metro-area data can be really helpful for people to say, 'Whoa, they're not kidding, this is right here,'" she says. "It can help public health prevention folks get their messages across and get people to change their behavior."
[...]
HHS told NPR that since it took over collecting hospital capacity data, it has "consistently displayed state-level hospitalization data to help inform the public about COVID-19 prevalence in their communities."
But public health experts say the state level data isn't detailed enough — and since the government is putting the effort into generating more granular daily analyses, it should share them.
[...]
Panchadsaram's data-tracking site COVID Exit Strategy pulls state-level hospital capacity estimates from HHS when they're updated, which generally happens once a week. In reviewing the reports obtained by NPR, Panchadsaram says it's clear that vital data is flowing into HHS daily. "But sharing with the public seems to be an afterthought," he says.
How many lives have been lost and will be lost in an effort to keep Trump in the White House?
What the hell?
You get a special passport if you were born in Jerusalem, but not anywhere else in Israel, or say...Palestine? Or anywhere else.The United States has issued the first passport to a Jerusalem-born American that lists Israel as the place of birth, a policy change by Donald Trump that has been condemned by Palestinians but will likely please the US president’s pro-Israel base ahead of next week’s elections.
alJazeera
Only those born in Jerusalem. Ridiculous.“You have a nation of birth – the State of Israel,” [US Ambassador to Israel David] Friedman told the teenager, thanking Trump for having “set this course in motion”.
[...]
On Thursday, reflecting the Trump administration’s recent policies on Jerusalem, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the passport change.
Americans born in Jerusalem can now list either Jerusalem or Israel as their birthplace, an embassy official confirmed.
Well, we've got a new Supreme Court now, buddy!In 2015, the US Supreme Court struck down a law that would have allowed Jerusalem-born US citizens to list Israel as their country of birth, saying it unlawfully encroached on presidential powers to set foreign policy.
No need to even bother changing the law. Just fucking break it. They'll back you up.
We've turned the corner --- to the straightway and it's downhill from here
From The Guardian:
<sarcasm font> Maybe we should stop testing. </sarcasm font>
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Fallout of the attempted coup in Venezuela
Culminating in abject failure.In a challenge to denials of government involvement, the ex-U.S. special operations sergeant whose security firm took part in a botched Venezuelan coup last May said two Trump administration officials met with and expressed support to planners of Operation Gideon, a Bay of Pigs-type operation that tried to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.
It’s a story of bungling, bravado and cloak-and-dagger plotting, with plans shared in clandestine meetings in the back of limousines while rolling through Miami, in restaurants and even at dusk on the 12th fairway of the Red Course of Trump Doral, the Miami Herald/McClatchy has learned.
Miami Herald
Didn't get paid, eh?The allegations reported exclusively in this story are also contained in a $1.4 million breach-of-contract lawsuit filed Friday, Oct. 30, by Miami attorney Gustavo J. Garcia-Montes in Miami-Dade Circuit Court.
The suit is against Juan Jose Rendon, a political consultant closely aligned with Venezuelan legislator Juan Guaidó, who the Trump administration in January 2019 began calling the legitimate president of the oil-rich South American nation.
It was brought on behalf of retired Sgt. 1st Class Jordan Goudreau, who in roughly seven hours of detailed interviews insisted he had encouragement from the administration and even held meetings to plan the operation at the Trump Hotel in the nation’s capital and at the Trump Doral west of Miami.
Imagine that.The goal [...] was to replace Maduro by installing Guaidó, whose name appears on a contract purportedly signed with the coup plotters. The complete document — obtained by reporters from the Miami Herald and McClatchy, its parent company — contains a never-before-seen clause that allows Guaidó to disavow any involvement if the mission failed.
[...]
An addendum to the contract said Silvercorp “will advise and assist … in planning and executing an operation to capture/detain/remove Nicolás Maduro (heretoafter, “Primary Objective”), remove the current regime, and install the recognized Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó.”
[...]
The failed coup resulted in the May 3 capture of two former American soldiers and 47 Venezuelans and led to the death of six would-be freedom-fighters who appear to have been executed.
[...]
Goudreau’s assertions are strongly denied by the people he identifies, although few were willing to do so on the record.
They alternately called him a rogue operative facing possible federal indictment, a soldier disparaging the Venezuelan opposition in hopes of getting his two men freed or a con man seeking a Netflix deal.
[...]
Inconsistencies abound on all sides of this tale.
Never met the man. Maybe there are pictures; he might have been a coffee boy.A deal was cut to provide humanitarian aid through this border, or to launch an insurrection. Or, perhaps both.
Saying little in the months that followed the failed operation, Goudreau said he came to feel abandoned and scapegoated. He decided to break his silence and name the people he said had knowledge of his efforts to overthrow the Maduro regime.
He also said in his lawsuit he had seen a competing offer of assistance to the Guaidó administration purportedly from Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and owner of the security firm Frontier Services Group. This is denied by Prince.
[...]
Goudreau’s lawsuit identified two Trump administration officials he said had prior knowledge of his plans. They are Andrew “Drew” Horn, at the time an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and Jason Beardsley, a former soldier who is an advisor at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
[...]
A spokesperson for Pence said the vice president does not know Horn, although Horn’s LinkedIn page identifies him as a former associate director of policy for Pence and now an advisor to the Director of National Intelligence.
“Vice President Pence had absolutely no knowledge of the rogue plot in Venezuela and does not know Mr. Horn,” said the spokesperson, Devin O’Malley.
Perfect for the job then.“Drew Horn was a Department of Energy employee who was detailed to the vice president’s office as a detailee on the domestic policy team,” one senior administration official told McClatchy. “He was not assigned any responsibilities in the national security portfolio, and he was not assigned any issues related to Venezuela.”
Was that Erik Prince's idea? Or Mike Pence's?The effort was codenamed Operation Gideon (or Operación Gedeón in Spanish) after the military leader from the Hebrew Bible who led a vastly outnumbered Israelite army to decisive victory.
SOMEbody had some sense.The failed operation led to the capture of Airan Berry and Luke Denman, both former special forces associates hired by Goudreau. Their images were broadcast widely on Venezuelan television, face-down with their arms tied behind their backs. They were each hastily sentenced in Venezuela to 20 years in prison in August under questionable due process.
[...]
A few weeks after the failed incursion, the FBI on May 21, 2020, raided a Boca Raton apartment where Goudreau was visiting and seized $56,800 in cash.
[...]
Goudreau, who was awarded three Bronze Stars for combat valor during his military career, alleges the FBI sought to lure him into a “death-by-cop” confrontation in the raid. Another participant in the coup effort confirmed Goudreau is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation.
[...]
Goudreau sat for online video interviews with Herald and McClatchy reporters from an undisclosed location. His lawyer provided what he said were the entire contents of Goudreau’s phone with contacts, social media chats, emails, text messages and photos and videos taken at training camps in Colombia. The FBI has the same contents, said Garcia-Montes, his attorney.
[...]
The special ops veteran insists his support of an attempted coup was encouraged by some in the Trump administration, including Horn and Beardsley, the Department of Veterans Affairs adviser who is also a former special forces veteran and an early and prominent African-American supporter of Trump.
[...]
According to the lawsuit against Rendon, Goudreau was introduced to Horn and Beardsley by Washington D.C. lobbyist Travis Lucas.
[...]
Lucas was one of the lawyers representing President Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller in 2017 when Schiller was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee as part of its inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Lucas in turn introduced him to Horn and Beardsley and they met multiple times, Goudreau said. The lawsuit alleges that “Horn assured Goudreau that licenses from the United States Government regarding the procurement of weapons and armaments for the project were forthcoming.”
“Drew Horn originally wanted to set up a meeting between myself and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago … a direct face-to-face but that never happened,” Goudreau alleged in the interview.
Continue reading.Invoices and emails from Lucas and shared with the Herald and McClatchy by Goudreau, show that Lucas charged him a total of $30,000 in December, 2019, for navigating laws related to foreign lobbying and federal regulations governing the export of weapons.
[...]
“I played no role whatsoever in the failed coup attempt in Venezuela, had no knowledge about the coup attempt before it transpired, and never discussed or communicated with any U.S. government official regarding a coup or uprising in Venezuela. Any suggestions to the contrary are completely false[," said Lucas through his lawyer.]
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Are they lucky, or gullible?
If you can stomach it, Aaron Rupar has a whole bunch of clips.
Including this one that sounds like a piss-poor comedy routine with canned laughter.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: Like father, like son.
I'd suggest they could be a team, but senior wouldn't share the stage with a "loser" like his son.
Friday, October 30, 2020
Because Covid-19 isn't killing enough of them?
First it was the cold in Nebraska. Now this:
Good thing he called off his North Carolina rally. He can't keep having news like this. BTW, he says it's because of the weather, so people will think he actually does care. Thing is, he's postponed it till Monday. Tonight's weather forecast for the area is mild. Monday's is worse.
Jim Jones Trump.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Carlson's "missing documents" found
Oh what a surprise.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
So...let's see 'em, Tucker with a F.[Tucker] Carlson told his audience Wednesday that a producer in New York had received the documents Monday from an unnamed source, and overnighted them to Los Angeles with a popular commercial shipper, later revealed to be UPS. But Carlson said that UPS informed them Tuesday morning that "the package had been opened and the contents were missing — the documents had disappeared."
[...]
On Thursday morning a UPS spokesperson reported that the company had found the missing contents.
"After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return," the spokesperson said by email. "UPS will always focus first on our customers, and will never stop working to solve issues and make things right. We work hard to ensure every package is delivered, including essential goods, precious family belongings and critical healthcare."
Carlson, however, immediately denied the claim in a text message to me as "not true." I sent him a screenshot of the email and followed up, but he has not replied.
[...]
UPS did not offer any details about what had happened to the package.
Carlson, however, had implied that the snafu had been a plot to steal the Biden documents before he could broadcast them to the world.
Salon
Whaaaaat? He didn't already know who he was talking to?Though the host was widely mocked for claiming to have lost history-shaping documents without having them copied first, he actually never said that.
When I asked him about that in a text later that night, he told me that "of course" he had made other copies.
"Hi, Tucker, it's Roger," I wrote. "Did you make copies of those documents? Or did anyone take photos?"
"Of course," Carlson replied. "The point is, someone's reading our texts," he said, suggesting that the package was intercepted because his communications were being monitored.
[...]
When I then asked if he would be willing to share the copies of the documents with me, he replied, "Which Roger is this?"
But it didn't stop them.Republican operatives and Trump allies have spent nearly two years trying to make corruption allegations against Hunter Biden and his father stick with the American public. They appear to have failed in that regard: A recent poll shows that Americans find Biden more honest than Trump by a margin of 54% to 37%.
In fact, probably the most tangible result of the effort so far has been its spectacular, history-making backfire last year, when the plot led directly to Trump's impeachment by the House of Representatives.
Let me start a little conspiracy theory right here: the whole missing documents thing was another Fox/Trumpworld scam set up with someone who delivers for UPS.Rudy Giuliani [recently] distributed contents to journalists of what he claims are the contents of Hunter Biden's old laptop. The FBI has reportedly now opened an investigation into those contents as being part of a possible Russian intelligence operation designed to influence the 2020 election.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
This should be challenged immediately - and even after Nov 3
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
He knows he's losing
He also just cancelled a rally in North Carlina because of "high speed winds" and "bad weather". Moved to Monday. We'll see what happens on Monday.President Trump has reportedly called off plans to host an election night event at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a person familiar with the plans told The New York Times.
The source told the Times that Trump will instead likely remain at the White House on Nov. 3.
This comes after the Trump campaign last weekend sent fundraiser emails to donors announcing a drawing that would give one winner, along with a guest, the chance to be flown to the nation’s capital, where they would stay for free and attend the Nov. 3 party at Trump International as VIPs.
[...]
At a press conference Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) said she was not aware at the time of party preparations at Trump International, which Washingtonian reported is sold out for election night.
D.C.’s coronavirus regulations currently restrict events to a maximum capacity of 50 people, including all attendees and staff.
The Hill
And the polls have the race at neck-and-neck.Weather.com’s hourly forecast shows a lovely evening in Fayetteville, with a high in the mid to upper 70s and winds only 15 mph. The winds Monday will be just as bad and the weather will be much cooler.
Raw Story
Analysts have been saying his rallies are bringing down his approval ratings. Maybe he figures he's going to go with court challenges to win anyway, so why bother.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Don't take Letitia James out of New York!
I hope this doesn't mean Biden is considering James for US AG. She's the hope for holding Trump to account for at least some of his crimes in New York. It won't be done at the federal level.New York Attorney General Letitia James is preparing a list of actions taken by President Trump that she hopes President Biden would reverse if he is elected.
"We're preparing a list. And the list is long," she told NBC News. "We'll have a team of individuals, again, working on reversing all of the bad regulations and laws that have been put forth."
[...]
James, a Democrat, has pursued multiple investigations of Trump and his business interests since she took office at the beginning of last year.
They include an investigation into whether the Trump Organization has been illegally inflating its assets in order to get tax breaks and attract investors. James has subpoenaed Eric Trump, the president's son, for that case.
The Hill
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Amurka
This reminds me of nothing more than pictures of Afghan fighters we saw in the Bush II era.
So why wasn't she arrested or fined, and tossed out of office?
[A] video shows Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (R) sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck, a Bible in her hand, as she rails against the coronavirus restrictions carried out in the state she helps lead.
[...]
Unlike in some other states, Idaho’s top two state executives do not run on a joint ticket, so she and Little competed and campaigned separately. When the pandemic hit in the spring, they quickly began to clash about how and whether to shut down businesses and public life.
By May, the Idaho Statesman reported, they were no longer speaking to each other directly. After Little ordered bars to stay closed until mid-June, McGeachin defied the directive and reopened her family’s Idaho Falls tavern weeks before the order lifted.
WaPo
JFC.Later that month, the day after Little’s stay-at-home order was lifted, McGeachin attended a “Disobey Idaho” protest outside the Idaho Capitol building. Then, she flew to Kendrick, a town in the Idaho Panhandle, to voice her support for a brewery that had been cited for violating statewide restrictions
Not your lieutenant.The video, released earlier this week by a libertarian group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, claims that Gov. Brad Little (R) infringed liberties to battle a pandemic that “may or may not be occurring."
[...]
But with some hospitals in the state nearing capacity, Little warned that Idaho was at “a crisis with our health-care system” that needed to take priority over all else.
“I sincerely hope that some people have passed the point of thinking the pandemic is not real or is not a big deal, or that their personal actions don’t really affect anything,” he said at a Monday news conference, according to Boise State Public Radio.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Yes, he can be impeached more than once
Hopefully, he won't have to be. He'll be gone.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
I think you can see where this could be going.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."
NY Magazine Intelligencer
I think that's a misreading of Trump's foreign policy. His foreign policy is to get whatever he can personally out of foreign connections.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.
[...]
“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.”
[...]
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.
Now that's his 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.
[...]
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.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Gone Glenn
And I just canceled my monthly subscription to The Intercept because of the latest Greenwald bullshit. So sad that he's gone off the deep end. I was contributing to support Jeremy Scahill's work, and I felt bad about ending it, but Glenn had gone on Tucker saying Adam Schiff is "the most pathological liar in all America," which I could not abide. I suppose I can resume supporting Scahill now.
The Trump cabal's attempts to corrupt the election
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Because the crush of governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political ends is so relentless, we often focus only on isolated examples as they skate past.
But we need to connect the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is truly staggering in its levels of corruption:
Rushing coronavirus treatments. [...] [S]cientists inside Trump’s own government are warning that the White House is laying the groundwork to increase pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, “even in the absence of agreement on its effectiveness and safety.”
[...]
Trump pushed top health officials to approve a plasma treatment for the coronavirus without the full vetting some officials wanted, and in a way that resulted in officials wildly overstating its benefits.
Trump has explicitly tied the vaccine to his reelection timetable and has lashed out at scientists, saying they’re slow-walking the process to hurt him politically.
This comes even as the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to award a $250 million contract to an outside communications firm in part to package a message of “hope” about the coronavirus. Democrats are investigating whether this is a taxpayer-funded “political propaganda campaign.”
Twisting intelligence to support campaign agitprop. A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower has revealed that top officials pressed for findings about civil unrest to be revised to downplay white-supremacist violence and pump up the illusion of an organized leftist domestic terror threat.
Helping cast doubt on Russian electoral sabotage. Attorney General William P. Barr may reportedly release an interim report on his department’s ongoing “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation before the election. Barr reportedly wants the U.S. attorney doing the review to move faster.
[...]
Limiting disclosure of knowledge of Russian sabotage. Meanwhile, Trump’s intelligence officials have announced an end to in-person congressional briefings on what they’re learning about ongoing Russian efforts to sabotage this election.
[...]
Meanwhile, the statements that intel officials have released about Russian interference are extraordinarily circumspect and muddy the waters with false equivalences about Chinese and Iranian efforts, which mislead the public and thus further facilitate it.
[...]
Trump isn’t trying to persuade a majority of U.S. voters to support him. Instead, he’s trying to get within what you might call cheating distance of pulling another electoral college inside straight even while losing the popular vote, just like last time.
WaPo
At least Christopher Steele is real
They simply don't care that they'll eventually get caught.One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator.
NBC
Not on its own, it didn't.The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.
[...]
The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden's presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.
Does it rhyme with Stephen Miller? Or Rudy Giuliani? Or maybe Steve Bannon?An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden's hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.
The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
[...]
Balding, an associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam who studies the Chinese economy and financial markets, posted the document on his blog on Oct. 22, seven weeks after it was initially published.
"I had really not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did," Balding said in an email.
Balding later claimed to NBC News that he wrote some of the document.
[...]
Balding said Aspen is "an entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report." Balding did not name the document's main author, saying "the primary author of the report, due to personal and professional risks, requires anonymity."
And they never give up....In addition to posting the document to his blog, Balding also promoted it in far-right media, appearing on Bannon's podcast and on "China Unscripted," a podcast produced by The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump media outlet opposed to the Chinese government.
[...]
Balding's blog was the primary driver of virality in conservative and conspiracy communities.
[...]
After the promise of a big reveal one day earlier, the document was also posted on the extremist forum 8kun by Q, the anonymous account behind the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.
On Twitter, the document was pushed by influencers in the QAnon community, as well as by Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality who works for Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes. Republican Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, tweeted the document to his 2.3 million followers.
[...]
Elise Thomas, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, first spotted telltale signs of a fake photo when she went searching for Typhoon Investigations' Aspen on the web.
[...]
Aspen's left iris juts out and appears to form a second pupil, a somewhat frequent error with computer-generated faces.
[...]
"The profile picture looks pretty convincing in the Twitter thumbnail, but when I popped it up into full view I was immediately suspicious."
[...]
Other parts of Aspen's identity were clearly stolen from disparate parts of the web. Aspen's Facebook page was created in August, and it featured only two pictures, both from his "new house," which were tracked back to reviews on the travel website Tripadvisor. The logo for Typhoon Investigations was lifted from the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, a digital literacy nonprofit.
[...]
In December, Facebook took down a network of fake accounts using computer-created faces tied to The Epoch Times. Facebook removed over 600 accounts tied to the operation, which pushed pro-Trump messages and even served as moderators of some Facebook groups.
Last month, Facebook removed another batch of computer-generated profiles originating in China and the Philippines, some of which made anti-Trump posts.
Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said computer-created identities are becoming common for disinformation campaigns, in part because they are easy to create.
DiResta, who helped examine a ring of AI-generated faces tied to the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA last month, said computer-generated profile pictures can be used to "build an army of fake people" to artificially support a cause or to make "disinformation operations harder to discover."
Get another copy, dingaling. Or maybe digitize them and share them by dropbox or some other encrypted service, eh?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: Oh no! I'm hearing that they're claiming there's no copy! LOLOLOL Like ANYone would send ultra-important documents through the mail without having a copy!!!!!
(I also understand it was a flash drive they mailed. So they were already digitized. Why ship a physical copy instead of transfering via encrypted file? If you can believe anything they say. And you can't.)
UPDATE: Oh, guess what? The drive has been found. What a surprise.
Supreme Court going soft prior to the actual election challenges
So you'll let your guard down.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
I just wonder if Barrett is going to realize how unqualified she is when she starts hearing from Kagan and Sotomayor, or if she's another Trump-Kavanaugh-inflated ego with no self-awareness.The Supreme Court left the status quo intact in a pair of swing-state election cases on Wednesday, turning aside Republicans who aimed to block a ballot-receipt extension in North Carolina and declining to expedite a Republican challenge to the Pennsylvania deadline, while leaving the option of weighing in on that case after Election Day.
[...]
No justice publicly dissented from the high court’s decision not to take up the Pennsylvania dispute in advance of next Tuesday’s election.
In a statement accompanying the denial in Pennsylvania, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that while “it would be highly desirable to issue a ruling” before the election, he “reluctantly conclude[s] that there is simply not enough time at this late date.”
[...]
Alito noted in the Pennsylvania case that the secretary of the commonwealth issued guidance to local election officials earlier on Wednesday to segregate ballots received after the close of polls but before the Nov. 6 deadline, cracking the door for a potential post-election decision.
[...]
Alito’s statement suggested that he believes those ballots could still be tossed, even if a ruling comes after Election Day.
[...]
In North Carolina, the court declined to block an extension of the state's ballot return deadline. Normally, ballots postmarked by Election Day there can be counted if they are received within three days of the election, but a pandemic-related change pushed that to nine days. Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito all said they would have blocked the extension in North Carolina, and no other justice publicly noted their dissent.
[...]
The court’s punt comes as Trump makes a fresh push to pressure officials to cut ballot counting short by calling for definitive results on Nov. 3, despite months-long warnings from public officials that his demands just aren’t operable in critical swing states.
[...]
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court on Tuesday, did not take part in the deliberations in this round of the litigation, which involves the proper role of state courts in changes to procedures in a federal election.
A statement from the court’s public information office Wednesday said Barrett did not participate “because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties’ filings,” not because she formally recused herself.
[...]
During her confirmation hearings earlier this month, Democrats pressed Barrett to agree to recuse herself from any election litigation that would come before the court this year, but she demurred.
[...]
That means Barrett, who was nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed earlier this week, could still rule in the Pennsylvania case and other election-related legal fights.
Politico
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)