Thursday, June 14, 2018

Last Call For That's Real White Of You, Con't

As I mentioned earlier this week, Virginia Democrat and Hillary veep pick Sen. Tim Kaine is running for re-election and his opponent is Republican/Actual White Supremacist™ Corey Stewart, who is already calling for Kaine to be investigated and jailed because of the crime of being Hillary's veep pick, or something.

After responding to his victory rally crowds’ “Lock her up” chants by saying it “might just happen,” the Republican Senate candidate who won the GOP primary in Virginia on Tuesday evening, Corey Stewart, again suggested that his opponent should be jailed. 
During a turbulent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, Stewart suggested that his opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was at the “center” of reports that a government informant was deployed to meet with members of the Trump campaign to probe their contacts with Russian officials at the start of what we now consider the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. President Donald Trump, Stewart —who claims he won because he fully aligned himself with Trump — and other far-right Republicans have seized on reports of the informant as evidence that a spy was sent to infiltrate Trump’s campaign. The President himself has dubbed the whole ordeal “spygate.”

“’ll tell you something, I really do believe that Tim Kaine has been at the center of all this stuff that you’re seeing with regard to the FBI, you know the whole problem is having the FBI spying by federal agency on a presidential campaign,” Stewart told Cuomo, who interrupted him to say there was “no proof” to back up his allegations
Stewart shot back: “We’re not in a court of law are we?” 
“That doesn’t mean the truth doesn’t apply, my brother,” Cuomo said. 
Stewart then repeated his claim that Kaine and the entire commonwealth of Virginia were at the “center” of the informant controversy. 
I would not be surprised if there’s an investigation of Tim Kaine before the year is out,” Stewart said. “Look here’s the question, at the end of the day people have to ask themselves, what has Tim Kaine accomplished in his six years in the United States Senate? Tim Kaine can’t point to a single accomplishment in the United States Senate for Virginia or Virginians. The only thing that Tim Kaine has done in the past six years is run for vice president, and he didn’t even do a very good job at that, I might add.”

Then this morning, Stewart tweeted that Kaine is a terrorist.



It's only Thursday.  Stewart has been the GOP candidate for Senate for less than 48 hoursAnd when I say Stewart is a white supremacist, I'm 100% not being hyperbolic.

He once stood proudly before a Confederate flag, declaring it was not a symbol of hatred, but “about our heritage.” 
After the march of torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville last year, which led to the death of a counterprotester, he criticized “weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough.” 
As officials around Virginia have grappled with whether to remove Confederate statues, he has compared those politicians to leaders of the Islamic State. 
Now Corey Stewart, a county official who for years has played to the hard-right fringe, captured the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia. 
He did so in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday when many centrist Republicans apparently stayed home, unhappy with a three-way race among candidates all professing strong loyalty to President Trump and given to fiery culture war pronouncements. 
Mr. Stewart, the chairman of a county board of supervisors who briefly led Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia, received a congratulatory overnight tweet from the president, who called Mr. Stewart’s Democratic opponent, Senator Tim Kaine, “a total stiff.” 
Tellingly, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said it would not support Mr. Stewart, who lags far behind Mr. Kaine in fund-raising and has a history of cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites that threatens to make him an albatross for down-ballot Republicans. 
White House officials said the president was unlikely to cross the Potomac River to campaign personally for Mr. Stewart unless there were signs that his race against Mr. Kaine had become competitive. 
The real worry for national Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that Mr. Stewart’s nomination may cost some incumbent Republicans in Virginia their seats in Congress.

When he loses, I hope he takes the rest of the Virginia GOP down with him.

Trump Cards, Con't

It looks like New York AG Barbara Underwood is picking up where her predecessor Eric Schniederman left off (before it turned out he was an abusive monster towards multiple women as he resigned in shame last month) and has now filed suit against the Trump Foundation, Donald Trump, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. for charities fraud.

In the suit, filed Thursday morning, attorney general Barbara Underwood asked a state judge to dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation. She asked that its remaining $1 million in assets be distributed to other charities and that Trump be forced to pay at least $2.8 million in restitution and penalties. 
Underwood also asks that Trump be banned from leading any other New York nonprofit for 10 years — seeking to apply a penalty usually reserved for the operators of small-time charity frauds to the president of the United States. 
In the suit, Underwood noted that Trump had already paid more than $330,000 in reimbursements and penalty taxes since 2016. New York state began probing the Trump Foundation in response to an investigation by The Washington Post.
But she asked the judge to go further, and require Trump to pay millions more. She said a 20-month state investigation found that Trump had repeatedly violated laws that set the ground rules for tax-exempt foundations — most importantly, that their money is meant to serve the public good, and not to provide private benefits to their founders.

“This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal law,” Underwood wrote in the legal complaint
The White House and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump has been president of the foundation since he founded it in 1987. In late 2016, he had promised to shut down the Trump Foundation — but could not while the attorney general’s investigation continued. 
Underwood was promoted to the position of attorney general only weeks ago, succeeding Eric Schneiderman (D) after he resigned following allegations that he had physically abused several romantic partners. Underwood was a career staffer, not an elected official. She has promised not to seek election for a full term as attorney general in the fall.

Underwood declined to comment on the case beyond issuing a written statement. “As our investigation reveals, the Trump Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality,” Underwood said in the statement.

Underwood said she had sent letters to both the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, identifying what she called “possible violations” of tax law and federal campaign law by Trump’s foundation. 
Underwood has jurisdiction over the Trump Foundation because the charity is based at Trump Tower in Manhattan and registered in New York State. 
Trump’s children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump were also named in the lawsuit because they have been official board members of the Donald J. Trump Foundation for years. Under the law, Underwood said, board members are supposed to scrutinize a charity’s spending for signs that its leader — in this case, their father — was misusing the funds.

But in reality, Underwood wrote, the three Trump children exercised no such oversight. The board had not actually met since 1999
.

The Trump Foundation is most likely guilty of all the things Trump accused the Clinton Foundation of doing, being a personal slush fund and money laundering vehicle for the Trump family to take kickbacks from for decades.  Believe me when I say Mueller and his team of forensic accountants are follwing this money trail, and as I've said all along, even if Trump fires Mueller and pardons himself on all federal charges, the state charges brought by NY are going to be much harder to make disappear.

That doesn't mean Trump can't find a federal judge to tie up this lawsuit like rope day at a contortionist's convention, but it's not like Trump can fire Underwood or pardon himself from the lawsuit.  Most importantly, his slimy kids are in real trouble from this.  Dad might be able to smokescreen this for a while but Ivanka and her rotten brothers will not have that luxury.

And if these "multiple violations of state and federal law" turn into possible criminal indictments complete with possible prison time, things are going to get real fun around family gatherings.

Oh, and it directly ties into the Trump campaign's constant illegality too.



It also means the DoJ will have to certainly open yet another federal investigation into the person in the Oval Office, an investigation that AG Jeff Sessions, having been a member of the Trump campaign at the time, cannot be allowed to oversee.

Congress too should look into this as well.  Republicans certainly would if the legal complaint that the NY AG is producing here were directed towards the Clinton Foundation.

Stay tuned.  The family that crimes together, does time together.

Sayonara, Mouths Of Sauron!

CBS News is reporting that Trump Regime Minister of Disinformation White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah are out.

Two of the most visible members of the Trump administration are planning their departures, the latest sign of upheaval in a White House marked by turmoil.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders and principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah are both heading for the exits, according to sources inside the White House and close to the administration. Sanders, who has become a confidante of President Trump since the departure of former communications director Hope Hicks, has told friends that she plans to leave the administration at the end of the year.

Shah is also considering his exit, but he has not yet settled on an exact date. Neither Sanders nor Shah responded to repeated requests for comment before this story was published. When reached Wednesday evening, both declined to comment on the record, and Sanders tweeted that she is "honored to work for @POTUS."

Several other lower-level positions in the communications department left vacant in recent weeks are likely to remain unfilled, with more departures expected in the coming weeks, according to a former official.

Numerous staffers have left the White House over the last several months, some voluntarily and others having been forced out. Those departures include Hicks; Jared Kushner's top communications aide, Josh Raffel; homeland security adviser Tom Bossert; National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton; Trump personal aide John McEntee; director of White House message strategy Cliff Simms; communications aide Steven Cheung; congressional communications director Kaelan Dorr; assistant press secretary Natalie Strom; and deputy director of media affairs Tyler Ross.

Now she didn't exactly deny the story in the tweet, which is the tell.  Trump often leaves Huckabee-Sanders and Shah out to dry by tweeting one thing and then leaving them having to deal with the "White House position" being the opposite of what Trump tweeted earlier in the day, and this happens several times a month, if not several times in the same week. It's exhausting having to cover for the worst liar on Earth.

Having said that, the two of them are getting paid handsomely to do it, and nobody's forcing them to, you know, actively work for Donald Trump.  If either of them had any shred of decency they would have resigned months ago or better yet never taken the job to begin with, knowing exactly what Trump was all about.  My sympathies, especially for Huckabee-Sanders, are precisely zero in this situation.  Besides, they'll land at FOX News within a week of leaving.

Somebody in the White House has it out for the two of them, and it could very well be John Barron Donald Trump himself, so who knows.  I'm thinking that neither Huckabee-Sanders nor Shah have what it takes to handle the press once Mueller closes in on Trump, and with Michael Cohen reportedly about to flip, that time could be sooner rather than later.

Of course, Jeff Sessions and John Kelly have been "heading for the exits" for over a year now, so who knows in the end.

StupidiNews!