Wednesday, December 3, 2025
When you've lost Newsmax
There's chatter that Trump is thinking about canning Kash Patel. Although that would be a very welcome turn of events, I think he's going to remove Hegseth. Too many embarrassing stories. Although this one does take Jeffrey Epstein out of the headlines.
Looks like they're trying to pin it on Admiral Bradley, who, granted, followed illegal orders.
Joke's on Pete now.
Sleepy Joe?
They televised this meeting, and Trump kept nodding off throughout.
Maybe they need to adjust his meds.
Monday, December 1, 2025
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Iced out
New Yorkers prevented ICE from rolling out today, blocking their exit from a staging garage.
UPDATE 08:18 pm:
If forced to bet,
I'd bet Trump will never be held accountable for any of his crimes beyond E Jean Carroll's case.
Wall Street Journal expose
Well, sort of. The fucking asshats gloated about it to the WSJ. Exposed themselves.
Everything with Trump is "business". He has no humanity. Everything is transactional.
He's not the first president to look with greedy eyes on foreign wars. In fact, Republican presidents before him have even started foreign wars for financial gains. Don't count him out on that, though. He's working on it.
This is why we can't have nice things.
STOP FUCKING ELECTING REPUBLICANS.
Yes, because "everybody" is only interested in business.The picture that emerges is a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to cement a peace agreement with business deals.
[...]
Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.
But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.
At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, [whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies] the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”
[...]
For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.
[...]
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
WSJ
Why not both?Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace effforts.
[...]
A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.
Sure, Jan.When a version of the 28-point plan leaked earlier this month, it drew immediate protests. Leaders in Europe and Ukraine complained it reflected mostly Russian talking points and bulldozed through nearly all of Kyiv’s red lines.
[...]
Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”
[...]
Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.
Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.
Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.
[...]
A person familiar with Witkoff’s thinking said the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.
Sure, Jan.Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites.
Because they are fighting so fiercely for the chance to be like money grubbing Americans. These asshats can't imagine doing anything for something other than money.“Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.
Russia dictating conditions to America. We've come a long way, baby.Career officials in the office overseeing sanctions at the Treasury Department have at times learned details of Witkoff’s meetings with Moscow from their British counterparts.
In the days after Alaska, a European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump administration had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.
Witkoff has worked closely with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has been all but frozen out of serious talks, and last week said he is leaving the government.
[...]
American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.
[...]
[Gentry] Beach, [Donald] Trump Jr.’s college friend, was in talks to acquire 9.9% of an Arctic LNG project with Novatek, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer—which is partly owned by Timchenko—if the U.S. and U.K. remove sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts reviewed by the Journal.
[...]
Dmitriev and Witkoff meanwhile were chatting regularly by phone about increasingly ambitious proposals. The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-and-gas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said. “If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”
As well they should be.Witkoff dialed into a videoconference with officials and heads of state from top European allies, and explained the outlines of what he understood to be Putin’s offer. If Ukraine would surrender the remaining roughly 20% of Donetsk province that Russia had failed to conquer, Moscow would forfeit its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. The European officials were confused. Did Putin mean he would withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as Witkoff was suggesting? Or, more likely, was Putin merely promising to not conquer the thousands of square miles of those two provinces that, after years of bloody fighting, remained in Ukrainian hands? Either way, Ukraine was skeptical about the value of a promise from Putin.
Witkoff wanted to strike while the iron was hot and hold a summit without delay. Dmitriev was optimistic Witkoff had taken Russia’s sensitivities on board: “We believe Steve Witkoff and the Trump team are doing a great job to understand the Russian position to end the conflict,” he told the Journal, a few days before.
The Aug. 15 summit fell apart almost as soon as it began. Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump arrived on Air Force One, meeting Putin, his longtime adviser Yuri Ushakov, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin launched into a 1,000-year history lecture on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The two sides canceled a lunch and an afternoon session where they were meant to check through their other issues, like the exchange of prisoners. Witkoff left uncertain where things stood, but hopeful talks would accelerate soon.
[...]
In October, President Zelensky flew to Washington, hoping to secure long-range, U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. His military wanted to cripple Russian refineries, pushing Moscow to negotiate on better terms.
By the time Zelensky arrived, Trump had spoken to Putin a day earlier and decided not to offer the Tomahawks.
Friday, November 28, 2025
"Kill them all"
"Clear the debris." Right.
Pete Hegseth should rot in a jail cell one day. Soon.
And the people who followed that order should spend time behind bars.
UPDATE 11/29/2025:
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Who gave the orders to disobey a judge's ruling?
Lock her up?With a contempt inquiry looming, the Department of Justice (DOJ) named Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as the Trump official who earlier this year approved the transfer of hundreds of people from the U.S. to a notorious Salvadoran megaprison after a judge forbade the removals.
Democracy Docket
Complete and total bullshit.The DOJ’s disclosure gives further insight into who in the Trump administration rebuffed court orders from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said earlier this month that he planned to move forward with contempt proceedings against the Trump officials involved in carrying out the flights to El Salvador.
[...]
In its new filing Tuesday, the DOJ said Noem approved the flights to El Salvador after being informed of the court’s order. The DOJ claimed that Noem’s actions were based on legal advice she received from a Department of Homeland Security lawyer.
The DOJ also asserted that Noem’s actions were legal because senior DOJ officials, including Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and then-Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, did not believe Boasberg’s orders applied to flights that had already left.
For months, the Trump administration has defended the removals by claiming that Boasberg’s initial oral order requiring it to return those removed under the AEA was not binding and his written order could not apply to the flights because they were outside of U.S. airspace.
Boasberg rejected those arguments when, in April, he said he found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for showing “a willful disregard” toward his orders. The judge’s attempt to proceed with contempt, however, was halted by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for seven months.
[...]
The judge also said he intends to receive testimony from former DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni, who accused his superiors of defying Boasberg’s order in a bombshell complaint earlier this year.
Reuveni, whose account was corroborated by internal DOJ documents, claimed that Bove, who is now a federal judge, suggested his subordinates should tell courts “f*** you” and ignore their orders to carry out Trump’s aggressive removals.
In a filing Tuesday, plaintiffs also recommended that Boasberg call Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, who has defended some of Trump’s most extreme deportation actions, as a witness in his contempt probe..
In a March 15 hearing, Ensign told Boasberg that he wasn’t aware of any plans to carry out the removal flights even as planes were idling on the tarmac or had already taken off.
More soldiers
Because if 2,000 weren't enough to keep 2 from being shot, perhaps 2,500 will work. We all know it's not about ANYONE's safety.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would send hundreds of additional National Guard soldiers to the nation’s capital after two soldiers were shot in the city Wednesday.
The announced escalation to Trump’s military occupation in Washington, D.C., comes less than a week after a federal court found that the president’s decision to deploy over 2,000 Guard members there was likely unlawful.
“President Trump has asked me, and I will ask the secretary of the Army to the National Guard, to add 500 additional troops, National Guardsman, to Washington, D.C.,” Hegseth said after the shooting Wednesday.
“We will never back down. We will secure our capital. We will secure our cities,” he added. “If criminals want to conduct things like this — violence against America’s best — we will never back down.”
Democracy Docket
Maybe find out before going public. They are now described as in critical condition.West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey (R) said the two Guard members were part of the West Virginia National Guard. He initially said the troops had died but later walked back that statement, saying his office received “conflicting reports” about their condition.
The shooting occurred just blocks away from the White House. In addition to the Guard soldiers, a suspect, who is now in custody, was also injured.
Oh. But this is somehow Biden's fault. I'm sure they'll tell us how.The Department of Homeland Security has identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who came to the United States in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome. CNN previously reported the suspect applied for asylum in 2024, which was granted by the Trump administration in April 2025.
CNN
Why?Shortly after Trump’s remarks, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it has stopped processing all immigration cases related to Afghan immigrants “indefinitely pending further review.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has asked for 500 more National Guard troops to be deployed to DC. It also asked a federal appeals court for an emergency stay of an order from a federal judge to remove the National Guard from Washington, DC. Last week, the judge ruled the deployment was unlawful.
Oh, here it is...
Ooops. Spoke too soon.Lakanwal is believed to be from Afghanistan and came to the United States in 2021 under the Biden administration.
[...]
"He previously worked with the USG, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar that ended in 2021 following the withdrawal from Afghanistan," CIA director John Ratcliffe said on Thursday.
[...]
On Tuesday, during the traditional turkey pardoning at the White House, Trump touted his administration's takeover of D.C. streets. He said it was "one of our most unsafe places anywhere in the United States. It is now considered a totally safe city."
ABC
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)