If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee reported raising a record $365 million in August, surprising even seasoned party fundraisers and putting to rest fears that President Trump would drown him in campaign spending.
The staggering cash haul coincides with Biden naming Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate before the convention. It more than doubles Trump’s $165 million record, set in July, and also eclipses the $193 million raised by Barack Obama in September 2008. Trump has not yet announced his August numbers.
Biden’s campaign made sure to release the numbers just before he held a press conference about school safety and the coronavirus Wednesday, when he took the relatively rare step of answering questions from reporters. Asked what he was going to do with the money, Biden was quick with a joke.
“You want to go to dinner?” Biden asked.
“Look, what I'm having to spend a lot of it on is to counter the lies that are being told by Trump's campaign and ‘Swift Boaters’ out there,” Biden said, referring to a new Republican super PAC. “What I'm trying to do is spend most of that, and by the way, I think the average contribution was like $40. We have over 1.6 million people who contributed in the middle of this economic crisis, somewhere between $5, $10, $15. I'd say that shows some genuine enthusiasm about making sure we have a chance at becoming president of the United States.”
Biden’s campaign was already in the midst of increasing his TV media buys. In one new ad, he condemns both “rioting and looting” as well as Trump for fanning “the flames” of the protests. The ad announcement preceded Biden’s decision to travel on Thursday to Kenosha, Wis., which has become ground zero in both the discussion of the protests and the swing state’s politics. Biden’s campaign anticipated announcing his total on Tuesday, but so many checks from small-dollar donors kept coming in that day that it delayed his team from giving a total until Wednesday.
“We literally couldn’t count the money fast enough. It’s a crazy problem to have,” said one Democratic donor and financier for the Biden campaign who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Don’t get me wrong: a lot of this is because of Trump. America hates him and people are giving what they can to stop him because they believe,” the donor said. “But you can’t underestimate how well Joe has played this, how important Kamala is to the team or how solid the campaign has been.”
They've got the cash. Time to use it. Relentlessly.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.
The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine against a disease that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out last week, the same day that President Trump said in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.
Over the past week, both Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, who heads the Food and Drug Administration, have said in interviews with news organizations that a vaccine could be available for certain groups before clinical trials have been completed, if the data were overwhelmingly positive. Public health experts agree that agencies at all levels of government should urgently prepare for what will eventually be a vast, complex effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans. But the possibility of a rollout in late October or early November has also heightened concerns that the Trump administration is seeking to rush the distribution of a vaccine — or simply to suggest that one is possible — before Election Day on Nov. 3.
“This timeline of the initial deployment at the end of October is deeply worrisome for the politicization of public health and the potential safety ramifications,” said Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist in Arizona. “It’s hard not to see this as a push for a pre-election vaccine.”
Three documents were sent to public health officials in all states and territories as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and San Antonio on Aug. 27. They outlined detailed scenarios for distributing two unnamed vaccine candidates — each requiring two doses a few weeks apart — at hospitals, mobile clinics and other facilities offering easy access to the first targeted recipients.
The guidance noted that health care professionals, including long-term-care employees, would be among the first to receive the product, along with other essential workers and national security employees. People aged 65 or older, as well as those from “racial and ethnic minority populations,” Native Americans and incarcerated individuals — all communities known to be at greater risk of contracting the virus and experiencing severe disease — were also prioritized in the documents.
This is, to put it quite frankly, 100% dangerous bullshit, and nobody should trust these vaccines without absolute proof from somebody well outside the regime. We're going to come to find out in January or so that the vaccine is "not as effective as initially thought" but by then thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans could be hospitalized.
There is no guarantee that a working vaccine would be ready by the election, and it's the height of outright danger to suggest that the nation prepare for a working vaccine.
Oh, and BLACK AMERICA WILL NOT BE YOUR GUINEA PIGS.
This is Trump trying to win by duping the American public, and it's reason #19,037 he should resign.
In the fabled “blue wall” — the collection of historically Democratic states that pundits (wrongly) assumed gave Hillary Clinton an Electoral College advantage in 2016 — Minnesota is the cornerstone. The Democratic candidate has won Minnesota in 11 straight presidential elections, the longest active streak in the country. What’s more, no Republican has won any statewide election in Minnesota since 2006 — not for Senate, not for governor, not even for state auditor.
It’s tempting to conclude from this that Minnesota is a safe Democratic state. But Minnesota is much more evenly divided than that record suggests: For example, it came within a couple percentage points of voting for now-President Trump in 2016. And as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012 — showed in 2016, streaks are meant to be broken.1
Most ominously for Democrats, there is evidence that Minnesota is becoming redder over time, with 2016 being a particular inflection point. In 1984, the state was 18.2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. But in 2016, for the first time since 1952, Minnesota voted more Republican than the rest of the U.S.
What explains Minnesota’s rightward shift? Fifty-three percent of the population age 25 and older are non-Hispanic white and lack a bachelor’s degree, a demographic with which Republicans — and especially Trump — have been gaining ground. Historically, though, Minnesota’s predominantly white, working-class population has actually been quite progressive: The state’s many German and Scandinavian immigrants (the biggest ethnic groups in Minnesota are German Americans, at 33 percent of the population, and Norwegian Americans, at 15 percent) brought with them their progressive values and faith in government, and its active labor movement (in 1983, more than 23 percent of Minnesota employees were members of a union) rallied blue-collar workers around the Democratic Party. In fact, Minnesota’s Democratic Party isn’t called the Democratic Party at all — it is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, reflecting its historical growth out of those two constituencies. But in recent elections, Democrats’ pro-environment and anti-gun positions have alienated these voters in places like the Iron Range, an ancestrally Democratic mining region, and in 2016 Trump was able to tap into their racial and economic grievances as well. Democrats went from carrying Minnesota by 7.7 points in 2012 to carrying it by just 1.5 in 2016. Tellingly, the counties that shifted the most toward Trump were also the counties with the highest concentrations of white people without a college degree.
Demographics, demographics, demographics. While Texas, Florida, Georgia, and NC are red heading for purple, the Upper Midwest is trending older, whiter, and towards the GOP. Trump came within 1.5% of taking Minnesota, and the state's been trending red for the last several years.
I hate to say it, but Biden has to win the state. A 4.2% win would definitely be a good thing, but if I'm Trump, I'm playing my cards here.
Look at it this way: if the only changes from 2016 are that Biden wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but he loses Minnesota in a nail-biter, Trump still wins 270-268.
Yeah, I'm worried. All of us should be. Minnesota to the Democrats is what Arizona is to the GOP, the break in the wall that signals a loss.
President Donald Trump has pulled most of his advertising from TV over the past week, ceding the airwaves to Democratic rival Joe Biden, who is currently outspending him by more than 10-to-1, advertising data shows.
Though Trump has an outsized ability to command national attention, it is unusual for a White House contender to go mostly dark on TV the week after their presidential convention. The election is just over two months away and early voting will begin in September in some states.
The move comes as Trump’s campaign has burned through money almost as fast as it has taken it in. And after Biden drastically narrowed what was once an overwhelming cash advantage enjoyed by the president, campaign officials have acknowledged they were trying to conserve money.
That’s allowed Biden an opportunity to communicate an unfiltered message to voters without competing advertising.
During the month of August, Biden doubled what Trump spent, dropping about $80 million in states that included key battlegrounds such as Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to data from the ad tracking firm Kantar/CMAG.
Trump’s limited spending targeted some of those states, but it was also directed to places like Iowa and Montana, which he won handily in 2016. This week he is spending about $1.6 million to Biden’s $18.3 million. Most of Trump’s ads are placed on Fox News Channel and CNN, as well as a smattering that will run in New Mexico and Washington, D.C., the data shows.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller said Monday that the campaign will be going back up on the air this week. Yet data from Kantar/CMAG shows it does not have an increase in advertising booked until Sept. 8.
“We have over $200 million worth of TV ads that are reserved (from) Labor Day until Election Day,” Miller said. “We’re speaking with voters in states as they’re starting to come online.”
As the presidential election fast approaches, the Department of Health and Human Services is bidding out a more than $250 million contract to a communications firm as it seeks to “defeat despair and inspire hope” about the coronavirus pandemic, according to an internal HHS document obtained by POLITICO.
Several weeks ago, the department sent out to a number of communications firms a “performance work statement,” which lays out what work will be expected of the winning firm. The document says that the vast majority of the money will be spent from now until January.
The document also lists the goals of the contract: “defeat despair and inspire hope, sharing best practices for businesses to operate in the new normal and instill confidence to return to work and restart the economy,” build a “coalition of spokespeople” around the country, provide important public health, therapeutic and vaccine information as the country reopens, and give Americans information on the phases of reopening. “By harnessing the power of traditional, digital and social media, the sports and entertainment industries, public health associations, and other creative partners to deliver important public health and economic information the administration can defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery,” the document also says.
The contract comes as the administration’s health agencies face growing questions about their independence in recent weeks. The head of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, admitted that he overstated the benefits of convalescent plasma at a news conference last week with President Donald Trump, and health officials have flip-flopped on key warnings about the virus, including the value of masks to protect Americans.
The FDA also faces a potential key decision in the coming few months: whether to give emergency authorization for a coronavirus vaccine. Polls show that nearly a fifth of adults would refuse a coronavirus vaccine if one were available, in some cases over fears that any approval would be motivated by politics rather than science. Just 14 percent of voters would be more likely to take a vaccine recommended by Trump, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll last month.
So odd how this "inspiring hope" campaign pushing Americans to "reopen the economy" just happens to coincide with 1) Trump's largest political liability currently with 185,000 COVID-19 fatalities and rising and 2) the Trump regime's message at the convention that Trump has done a "fantastic" job handling the pandemic.
Don't take Trump's word for it, take the word of the experts, who happen to be working for Trump (and not the American people.)
Point is, Just because Trump is retooling his message this week, doesn't mean the Firehose of Lies™ isn't being primed to spew after Labor Day.
Here's an interesting scenario from Just Security's Martin Sheil: the court fight over Trump's tax returns between Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance and the Trump regime isn't over the returns themselves, but the fact that what Vance subpoenaed was the copy of Trump's returns filed by accounting firm Mazars USA.
The goal here isn't what's in the federal returns, but what's not in them, mainly any defense that Trump could use to blame Mazars themselves for his tax issues. Sheil proposes that the state tax returns are a huge, huge clue that there's fraud, and that the Mazars copy is needed to prove the accountant didn't do it...and that Trump did.
This term, the Supreme Court declined President Donald Trump’s attempts to shield personal financial records from congressional and judicial subpoena. The ruling’s impacts on executive powers and attorney-client privilege have been widely reported, and litigation over access to the documents will likely soon reach critical mass.
But Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney (DA), may have already obtained the pertinent New York state tax returns for the Trump Organization and its executives, including Trump and his family.
Should this be the case, then why the fuss over the Mazars USA subpoena that has already been appealed and opined upon by the Supreme Court and sent back to the federal District Court in Manhattan for further argument and appeal? What other surprises can the public expect?
It is a routine internal procedure for agents of the New York state tax authority assigned to criminal tax investigations authorized by the New York Attorney General’s (AG) office (of which the Manhattan DA is a part) to obtain business and personal state tax returns that are material to their inquiry. It is likely that the experienced criminal tax investigator on the DA’s team has followed this routine protocol, and obtained the state tax returns early in their investigation.
But the tax returns alone would not be sufficient to establish criminal tax fraud. Criminal tax investigators for New York traditionally include retired Internal Revenue Service (IRS) criminal investigators working towards a second pension. These experienced forensic accountants would be most concerned with the classic tax fraud defense historically posed by the accused, wherein the taxpayer attempts to shift responsibility for the alleged fraud to the accountants who prepared the tax returns in question. Tax crooks have long raised their hands in innocence and then pointed their fingers at the hired hands claiming, “it was all their idea” with regard to any alleged tax fraud. A viable tax fraud indictment cannot proceed until this defense is cut off. This may explain the intense legal struggle over the Mazars USA subpoena. The Mazars USA files will include much more than completed tax returns. Draft tax returns, financial statements, correspondence, emails, texts, and notes to the file containing direction from the taxpayer client to the preparer will likely be found in the Mazars USA files accompanied by the accountant’s work papers and notes to the file.
This type of evidence will not only cut off a potent defense of the taxpayer but it will also likely provide the investigators with a trove of evidence of intent or mens rea, demonstrating to a potential jury that the fraud committed was, in fact, intentional and not some type of accident, negligence, or innocent mistake. Paul Manafort’s accountant testimony at trial was so devastating that his attorney famously cried out in open court “only a fool would provide their accountant this type of information.” It is precisely this type of information that Vance is seeking from the Mazars USA subpoena.
If the investigative team has pursued normal protocols, then we can make the rebuttable presumption that the Manhattan DA has already outlined a potential tax fraud indictment based on tax returns already in their possession and evidence previously obtained.
And the key to all this is Michael Cohen.
The DA’s team likely has all the grand jury information (documents and testimony) generated by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) investigation of Michael Cohen. All that would be needed to obtain the above SDNY grand jury evidence would be for an individual from the office of the Manhattan DA or New York AG to be placed on what is known as the 6(e) list which is a record of individuals authorized for disclosure of grand jury information. The prosecutor maintains this listing and adds individuals who are needed as the inquiry progresses.
Indeed, information sharing between federal and state prosecutors has already been established in related cases. Early in his investigation, Robert Mueller traveled to New York to meet with state prosecutors and to establish cooperation between the offices (likely including adding state prosecutors to the 6(e) list) – thus ensuring that state inquiries could continue even if the New York-based targets of Mueller’s investigations were federally pardoned or if Mueller were fired. Cohen was part of the Mueller investigation and it is likely that the 6(e) list for his grand jury included authorized officials from the New York AG’s offices.
Additionally, and notably, Deutsche Bank has cooperated with Vance’s subpoena for critical bank documents which can be used by the Manhattan DA to further corroborate tax fraud allegations. The DA may also look to use the records to pursue bank fraud violations that were referenced in Cohen’s congressional testimony; Cohen stated that the Trump Organization had submitted falsified financial statements to banks when applying for loans. The material gathered from a successful Mazars USA subpoena may also be used to corroborate these potential bank fraud charges as Mazars USA reportedly refused to certify the financial statements provided by the Trump Organization that were then submitted to the bank. Instead, Mazars USA included an unusual disclaimer with the financials: “Users of this financial statement should recognize that they might reach different conclusions about the financial condition of Donald J. Trump.”
Clearly, the Vance team will want to drill down on just why Mazars USA would include such a disclaimer with any financial statement that the company prepared for the Trumps.
Which may mean that the bulk of what Cyrus Vance's office already needs to make the case on Trump came from the Cohen investigation, shared by Mueller.
Vance likely possesses substantial evidence and investigative leads gathered in the Mueller and SDNY inquiry into Cohen. This would no doubt include information as to who directed Cohen to submit false invoices to the Trump Organization; these false invoices led to Cohen receiving checks totaling $420,000 to reimburse him for his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels et al, a total which was “’grossed up’ for tax purposes,” according to SDNY.
The inclusion of taxes in the reimbursement payments by the Trump Organization indicates that these payments were treated as a business expense on the Trump business records, which would then flow through to the tax returns unless flagged by some executive prior to submission to the relevant tax authorities. If the deduction were not corrected then, flagrantly false tax returns would have been prepared, subscribed to, and submitted, based on the prior falsification of the business deduction for legal expenses.
Thus, the alleged tax fraud was committed in association with the cooking of the books of the Trump Organization stemming from the posting of the false invoices. This fraud elevates the state misdemeanor of falsification of business books and records to felony status since it is in coordination with the commission of another felony – tax fraud. Mail fraud and/or wire fraud charges could also be contemplated since the false invoices were either mailed or wired as were the reimbursement payments. Trump signed one reimbursement check while in the White House. He further misrepresented these payments as ‘personal’ on his 2018 financial disclosure form in an attempt to characterize these payments as both business expenses (in the tax returns) and as personal expenses (in his financial disclosure form). This misrepresentation adds to the evidence of deliberate intent to defraud in any prospective Vance prosecution.
Vance has also referenced ‘patterns’ of illegal conduct when justifying the Mazars USA subpoena which requested Trump-related tax returns going back eight years. Patterns of financial impropriety have long been held to be evidence of ‘intent’ on the part of the defendant. Pro Publica published an analysis pointing out tax and loan discrepancies on the part of the Trump Organization relative to the 40 Wall St. building going back to 2012 and 2013. Cohen’s congressional testimony suggested that the falsification of business expense invoices was not an isolated case but part of a pattern on the part of Trump and his business to alter his business records at will.
Cooking the books to hide Trump's payoffs to Stormy Daniels is felony fraud at the state level, not just the federal one. If Cyrus Vance gets his hands on the Mazars USA copy of Trump's tax returns, and Mazars is able to provide the documentation that they followed the law in preparing the returns and that the Manhattan DA's office can crunch the numbers Trump gave them, finding they were fraudulent, it's prison time for the Tangerine Tyrant.
Without the Mazars returns specifically, Trump's defense is that "the accountants ripped me off".
That's why this fight has literally gone to the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Bill Barr continues to openly remove obstacles in his way towards a transition to Trump dictatorship, this time removing a 23-year Justice Department veteran overseeing the legality of counter-terrorism activities and replacing him with the numbnuts who is such an expert on legal policy and procedure that he leaked the Trump regime's charges against Julian Assange.
Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr's recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience. "It's very alarming," said Katrina Mulligan, who worked for the Obama administration in several national security roles and then, after President Donald Trump's inauguration, joined the Office of Law and Policy in the Justice Department's National Security Division.
For much of the past decade, that little-known office has been led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, not a political appointee. But two weeks ago, Wiegmann, 54, was told he is being reassigned and replaced with a political appointee, according to a Justice Department spokesman and sources familiar with the matter.
Mulligan and other sources told ABC News that the new head of the office is 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a cyber-crimes prosecutor who joined the federal government six years ago and made international headlines in November 2018 when he accidentally revealed that federal charges had been secretly filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Mulligan said that given Dwyer's limited time and experience handling national security matters, he is "a very odd" choice to replace Wiegmann, whom she described as "exceptional" at managing government bureaucracy and resolving "highly contentious matters across the government."
The timing of the personnel change – coming just two months before the U.S. presidential election, and in the midst of a battle against domestic terrorism and foreign interference in the election – has worried current and former members of the national security community. Past chiefs of the office have served as political appointees, while others – like Wiegmann – served as career officials, so, "It would not have been that unusual early in an administration to place a political [appointee] in that policy role, but to do that now is very unusual," one current U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
None of this makes sense two months before an election unless you want a particular loyalist in the Justice Department's office of determining which of the Executive Branch's activities are legal and defensible, particularly in the name of counter-intelligence.
Because, you know, you're running amoral and illegal counter-intelligence operations on, say, political opponents.
The Trump regime has given up any pretense of trying to save the country from a deadly pandemic and is now openly toying with the idea of simply stopping the fight against COVID-19 and to let it run its course by lifting all safety precautions, with a couple hundred million people infected and millions dead as a result.
One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.
The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House earlier this month as a pandemic adviser. He has advocated that the United States adopt the model Sweden has used to respond to the virus outbreak, according to these officials, which relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.
Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country has among the highest infection and death rates in the world. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic.
But Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’s liberties.
That this approach is even being discussed inside the White House is drawing concern from experts inside and outside the government who note that a herd immunity strategy could lead to the country suffering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lost lives. “The administration faces some pretty serious hurdles in making this argument. One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes,” said Paul Romer, a professor at New York University who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018. “Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”
Atlas, who does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology, has expanded his influence inside the White House by advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going, distressing health officials on the White House coronavirus task force and throughout the administration who worry that their advice is being followed less and less.
Atlas declined an interview request. White House spokesman Judd Deere did not respond to specific questions for this story and instead said in a statement that Atlas is a “world renowned physician and scholar of advanced medical care and health care policy” and criticized the media for reporting on the topic.
White House officials said Trump has asked questions about herd immunity but has not formally embraced the strategy. The president, however, has made public comments that advocate a similar approach.
Today, Rep. James E. Clyburn, Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, released eight weeks of White House Coronavirus Task Force reports obtained in response to the Select Subcommittee’s July 29, 2020, request to Vice President Mike Pence and White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx. These reports—which the White House sent privately to states but did not disclose to the public—directly contradict the Administration’s rosy public statements downplaying the threat of the virus.
“The Task Force reports released today show the White House has known since June that coronavirus cases were surging across the country and many states were becoming dangerous ‘red zones’ where the virus was spreading fast,” said Chairman Clyburn. “Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the President and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans. As a result of the President’s failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the Task Force first started issuing private warnings, and many of the Task Force’s recommendations still have not been implemented. It is long past time that the Administration finally implement a national plan to contain this crisis, which is still killing hundreds of Americans each day.”
There's little doubt that if the American people refuse to make Republicans pay politically for the 185,000 dead, then millions more will be sacrificed in a second Trump term on the altar of "freedom". These assholes finally will have a national strategy, and that's "Let the states decide who survives, we no longer care."
Of course, that's been the actual strategy from March of this year, but now it'll have the CDC stamp of approval on it. You'll get sick and live, or not. Liberty and Justice for all!
The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.
The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.
But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.
A bipartisan report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released this month came the closest to an examination of the president’s links to Russia. Senators depicted extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia, identified a close associate of a former Trump campaign chairman as a Russian intelligence officer and outlined how allegations about Mr. Trump’s encounters with women during trips to Moscow could be used to compromise him. But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Mr. Trump’s finances.
Now, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election, major questions about his approach to Russia remain unanswered. He has repeatedly shown an openness to Russia, an adversary that attacked American democracy in 2016, and refused to criticize or challenge the Kremlin’s increasing aggressions toward the West. The president has also rejected the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in 2016 to bolster his candidacy and the spy agencies’ assessment that Russia is trying to sabotage this year’s election again on his behalf. Mr. Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary. Mr. Rosenstein determined that the investigators were acting too hastily in response to the firing days earlier of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, and he suspected that the acting bureau director who approved the opening of the inquiry, Andrew G. McCabe, had conflicts of interest.
Mr. Rosenstein never told Mr. McCabe about his decision, leaving the F.B.I. with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties. Mr. McCabe said in an interview that had he known Mr. Mueller would not continue the inquiry, he would have had the F.B.I. perform it.
“We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” Mr. McCabe said. “I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”
Rod Rosenstein killed the FBI's investigation into Trump's Russia financial ties more than three years ago, and since then all kinds of evidence have emerged showing that Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were deep in the pockets of Russian oligarchs with a huge money laundering scheme, posing an unprecedented national security risk due to financial blackmail.
On Feb. 23, 2018, White House counsel Don McGahn sent a two-page memo to Chief of Staff John Kelly arguing that Jared Kushner's security clearance needed to be downgraded, the New York Times' Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, "Donald Trump v. The United States."
Driving the news: Schmidt reports directly from the confidential McGahn memo for the first time, describing how Kelly had serious concerns about granting Kushner a top-secret clearance in response to a briefing he had received related to the routine FBI investigation into Kushner’s background.
"The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved," McGahn wrote in the memo to Kelly.
The details of the highly sensitive intelligence that raised alarms with Kelly are not revealed in the McGahn memo or in Schmidt's book.
McGahn wrote that he had been unable to receive the briefing or "access this highly compartmented information directly" about Kushner, Schmidt reports.
"Interim secret is the highest clearance that I can concur until further information is received," McGahn concluded, referring to the level of classified information Kushner would be able to access.
Between the lines: "By reducing Kushner's clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner's access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods."
Trump directly gave Kushner the highest security clearance so he could be briefed on top intelligence matters...so Trump didn't have to deal with it.
The day after President Trump fired FBI boss James Comey, the president phoned John Kelly, who was then secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and offered him Comey's job, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, "Donald Trump v. The United States."
Driving the news: "But the president added something else — if he became FBI director, Trump told him, Kelly needed to be loyal to him, and only him."
"Kelly immediately realized the problem with Trump's request for loyalty, and he pushed back on the president's demand," Schmidt writes.
"Kelly said that he would be loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law, but he refused to pledge his loyalty to Trump."
Why it matters: This previously unreported conversation sheds additional light on the president's mindset when he fired Comey. Special counsel Robert Mueller never learned of this information because the president's lawyers limited the scope of his team's two-hour interview with Kelly.
"In addition to illustrating how Trump viewed the role and independence of senior officials who work for him, the president's demand for loyalty tracked with Comey's experience with Trump," Schmidt writes.
We knew Muller was sabotaged, now we know why.
Donald Trump has moved mountains and suborned an entire political party, not to mention the American judiciary to protect his financial records from any scrutiny. The DoJ failed to look into his fiances. The Senate failed to look into Trump's finances. The House was blocked by years of lawsuits.
Mr. Biden, who has been a firm supporter of peaceful protests, is expected to travel on Monday to condemn violence, and to note that chaos has unfolded on Mr. Trump’s watch, according to someone familiar with his plans. He is also expected to charge more broadly that the president is seeking to change the subject from the coronavirus and economic challenges the country faces. Details of his Monday plans weren’t immediately clear.
On Saturday, he also got some cover on the left from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who at once praised Mr. Biden’s candidacy and policy positions and stressed the ways he and Mr. Biden “disagree on a number of issues.” The comments reflect the Democrats’ delicate balancing act as they try to keep their moderate and progressive wings united at the same time that Republicans are trying to portray Mr. Biden and his party as too progressive.
In Mr. Sanders’s speech, which was broadcast over livestream, he denounced Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy during the pandemic. Mr. Sanders, the standard-bearer for the party’s left wing, then commended several of Mr. Biden’s proposals that he said would “go a long, long way in improving life for working families.”
Among the policies that he called attention to were Mr. Biden’s support for a $15 federal minimum wage, equal pay for women, investment in infrastructure and universal prekindergarten. And while Mr. Sanders prefers a single-payer “Medicare for all” health care system — which Mr. Biden does not support — he also offered some praise for Mr. Biden’s health care proposal.
Trump will apparently counter with a rally in Kenosha itself on Tuesday, because of course we need more violent rhetoric from the Terrorist-in-Chief.
A spokesman for the president said that on Tuesday, Mr. Trump will visit Kenosha, Wis., where a police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, led to an outpouring of anger and protests that in some cases turned destructive. The president would meet with local law enforcement, the spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a tweet. National Guard troops were deployed to Kenosha last week.
Democrat keep falling into this, what I call the "Sun Tzu trap": If you engage the enemy using rules that the enemy does not follow themselves, you will find yourself at a disadvantage.
Trump, for instance, never has to denounce anything. People will go out of their way to gaslight and say "He never meant that" or "He never said that" and the perfect example of this is his "very fine people on both sides" comments on the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia a few years ago. The first time he did it was a stretch to say "and he also condemned the white supremacists" but then he equated both sides again just days later.
Combative and insistent, President Donald Trump declared anew Tuesday “there is blame on both sides” for the deadly violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, appearing to once again equate the actions of white supremacist groups and those protesting them. He showed sympathy for the fringe groups’ efforts to preserve Confederate monuments.
The president’s comments effectively wiped away the more conventional statement he delivered at the White House a day earlier when he branded members of the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who take part in violence as “criminals and thugs.”
Trump’s advisers had hoped those remarks might quell a crush of criticism from Republicans, Democrats and business leaders. But the president’s retorts Tuesday suggested he had been a reluctant participant in that cleanup effort and renewed questions about why he seems to struggle to unequivocally condemn white nationalists.
The blowback was swift, including from fellow Republicans. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said Trump should not allow white supremacists “to share only part of the blame.” House Speaker Paul Ryan declared in a tweet that “white supremacy is repulsive” and there should be “no moral ambiguity,” though he did not specifically address the president.
Even Republicans called on Trump to denounce his own rhetoric. But that became "The media lied about the very fine people quote" as vomited out by Ann Althouse earlier this month. (no link, because ugh.)
But I'm reading the text this morning because I saw in a tweet that he was forefronting the Charlottesville "fine people" hoax. On his first day of campaigning with his running mate, he led with that. I say "he," but I don't really believe it's him. I think it's more likely that he's a foggy-minded figurehead, and other people have decided to frame the message like that. I consider these people — whoever they are — despicable. They have chosen quite deliberately to commit to a lie that is intended to make black people feel hated and they are doing it for political gain.
As my earlier post about the tweet says, I blogged in April 2019, "If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President." Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He's doubled down on the lie and he's making it the centerpiece of his campaign!
Except as you can see above, Joe Biden was right. Donald Trump absolutely used the phrase "there is blame on both sides" regarding Charlottesville, which explains why Ann Althouse is a shitty law professor, completely disregarding the fact Trump said it just days after the incident.
But, Biden is the one who has to denounce the violence. Remember how that works. You'll be seeing a lot more of it.
Imagine roving patrols of Trump faithful attacking every Black and brown person they can find. Imagine that happening all over America in the wake of a Biden win...or a Trump win.
In another country, this would be described as "Militias loyal to the regime".
An Arkansas sheriff resigned Friday after coming under fire over a leaked racist recording.
Sheriff Todd Wright of Arkansas County, about 85 miles southeast of Little Rock, resigned effective immediately on Friday during a public meeting on the incident at the county's Quorum Court, which is its governing legislative body. The meeting, which was recorded live and posted on Facebook, was held after a local news outlet, the Pine Bluff Commercial, identified Wright as the man heard in a five-minute audio recording delivering a racist rant. According to the local outlet, Wright is heard on the recording, which has been widely shared on social media, becoming upset that a woman he was with spoke to a Black person in a store.
Throughout the recording, the woman refers to the man as “Todd.” The man in the recording uses a racial slur against Black people about nine times.
Wright apologized at the court meeting for any offense his recorded remarks may have caused and said that he made those comments in the heat of the moment when he was "upset over certain things."
He also insisted he was not racist.
"That's not me," he said.
Following his remarks, a woman who identified herself as the mother of the man Wright disparaged in the recording said she doesn't know why Wright felt the need to call her son, whom she described as a hardworking man with two jobs, "names like that" over and over.
"I don't appreciate you calling him or anybody else the N-word," she said. "If you got problems, don't bring them to work."
It would have been the former Sheriff's word against that of a Black employee at a store and it would have been immediately dismissed. Later on, that Black employee would have been fired, and/or worse, faced an entire county's worth of angry deputies that would have absolutely found an excuse to put him in a cell, or put him in a grave.
See, that still might happen.
But the only reason that Black employee isn't already in the county lockup or in a pine box is because somebody recorded Todd's rant here. Because no matter how furious you get as a white person in America, you always, always have the option to take it out on the nearest Black person and make them suffer for existing in your white America, and odds are extraordinarily high that you will get away with it.
Brian Henry, mayor of the town of Pawleys Island and owner of Get Carried Away and Palmetto Cheese, is facing public backlash after posting that Black Lives Matter should be treated like a terror organization, among other comments that some have deemed racist and divisive.
In the aftermath of a double murder in Georgetown County on Monday afternoon, Henry publicly posted the following on Tuesday:
“I am sickened by the senseless killings in Georgetown last night.
“2 innocent people murdered. Not 2 thugs or people wanted on multiple warrants. 2 white people defenselessly gunned down by a black man. Tell me, where is the outrage? When and where will we begin rioting and burning down businesses in Georgetown. Answer is simple, it won’t happen. Because we live in a civil society, and it won’t change what happened. The victims’ families and friends will mourn and undoubtedly feel anger and confusion. Can’t imagine their pain. So why do we stand by and allow BLM to lawlessly destroy great American cities and threaten their citizens on a daily basis? Should they have a carte blanche license to pillage and destroy? Why? This has gone on too long. Rise up America. This BLM and Antifa movement must be treated like the terror organizations that they are. Law and order, protection of liberty, and the right of peaceful enjoyment. If we don’t have that, we no longer have a country. My wife cried last night when she read about these murders. I’m sure their family is devastated. This did not have to happen. Does the senseless murder of these people not matter as much because it doesn’t fit the media narrative. You are damn right their lives matter. And we should all be outraged and engaged to demand action and stem the tide of lawless fringe. We can’t stay silent anymore. All lives matter. There I said it. So am I racist now? I think not. How about the POS who just gunned down 3 defenseless white people? You be the judge.
“We need Law and Order. Now!”
Henry was referring to both Charles Nicholas Wall and his stepdaughter, Laura Anderson, being shot and killed after a vehicle collision on U.S. 521 in Georgetown County.
The Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office has charged Ty Sheem Ha Sheem Walters III, 23, of Moncks Corner, with two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder and three counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime. He made his first appearance in court Wednesday, where his bond was denied. Walters remains in jail at the Georgetown County Detention Center.
Now, Walters here is facing a double murder rap. He will get what he deserves.
But every other Black person in Georgetown County, SC just got put on notice that their lives are officially forfeit. Every Black person who's not Ty Walters is going to have to be taught a lesson by the Mayor here.
This time, the backlash against Black Lives Matter is going to lead to deaths. It's going to lead to lynchings. It's going to lead to Black bodies hanging like strange fruit. And in a Trump second term? It's going to be national.
As a law enforcement officer, the odds of getting away with it go up exponentially.
Just like the cops who killed Breonna Taylor here in Kentucky.
Unless you get caught on audio/video, that is, and the whole world sees it.
There's a reason why police want to outlaw recording cops.
After the first full week of classes in Duval County, school officials say they are still counting how many teachers and students test positive for the novel coronavirus. But, the district said, it can’t share those numbers.
The Duval County Health Department told Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) officials Tuesday they needed to get permission from the state level in order to tell parents and the community how many cases are in its schools. On Friday, after multiple requests for answers, the Florida Department of Health said the information about the number of COVID-19 cases in schools was “confidential.”
“In the interest of public health in Florida, the Surgeon General instructed County Health Departments to provides [sic] school districts with information regarding COVID-19 cases in their schools. However, this information is considered confidential,” a Florida Department of Health spokesman said in an emailed statement.
The health department said school districts have been advised the information about COVID-19 cases in schools is confidential, per state law. But, the spokesman added, the department does not regulate school district operations.
Healthcare law experts who spoke to News4Jax have denied that the statute cited by Florida health officials applies to school systems.
The Florida Department of Health did not respond to questions asking if or when it will give school districts approval to publish the data. The health officials also didn’t give a specific date for when they plan to release the updated copy of the data themselves.
“Unfortunately, that’s not a question that I have a solid answer to. I can’t really predict how the state’s going to manage the request and manage the process,“ said DCPS Director of Communications Tracy Pierce.
DCPS, which reported four coronavirus cases in its schools before being asked to stop, said it believes the information should be available for parents.
“We feel very strongly that families need to know this information. Particularly parents, because they are making enrollment, attendance decisions based on this information. It’s the district’s stance that we want to provide it,” said Pierce. “We have engaged our own attorneys assigned to the school system and we are now in the process of doing what the DOH advised that we do. Which, is to seek the permission of the state department of health because again, you know, if I were a parent with a child in school right now, I would want to know because that’s going to impact the decisions I make.”
The snag in districts reporting COVID-19 cases in schools comes after the state accidentally published a draft report of school-related cases. The data, however, was complicated and would not give a clear picture of successful mitigation or of outbreaks within a school or school district. The draft report was taken down quickly after being published on Monday but showed cases were being counted based on where a staff member or student lived and not based on the location of the school where the person attended or was employed.
Nine weeks until the election, and you think any county health department in Florida is going to be able to publish the number of COVID-19 cases in schools?
You live in America. America doesn't work like that. Shut up and praise Dear Leader and Governor DeSantis for their great work in protecting you and your family from the Invisible Enemy™.
Your kids bringing home COVID-19 is nothing you need to worry about, citizen. If you're still alive in November and not dying in a hospital, vote for the GOP. Everything is fine. Enjoy Florida's beaches, restaurants, and theme parks today!
Police brutality and unaccountability have been with us a long time, and it hasn't always been Black folk as the victims, and it hasn't always been in the South or in the Midwest, or even NYC. Ten years ago, Native woodcarver John T. Williams was shot and killed by Seattle police, and the journey to justice for his brother Rick has been a long, lone road.
THE BROTHER’S WORDS COME TO HIM AT NIGHT. They come clear and strong, no matter what sounds roil off six-lane Aurora Avenue and through the motel room window. They come to him in the morning, on the bus as it hammers south into the city. And as he sits on the patch of grass in the shadow of the Space Needle, where he carves nearly every day. Wherever Rick Williams is, whatever he’s doing, if anger or rage or even revenge fills his mind, the words of his late brother John put out the storm.
He first heard them more than 50 years ago, when he was 14. John was nine. “I want you to say ‘peace,’” the younger brother said, “and I want you to learn peace.” Unusual thing for a child to say, enough that the words stuck with Rick through the decades.
They came to him again on the afternoon of August 30, 2010, when a cop told him another officer had shot his brother to death. “Say peace.” “Learn peace.” Hard concepts to juggle in the moment. Even harder once the details came to light.
As the city learned of his brother’s final moments, so did Rick. How Seattle police officer Ian Birk—unprovoked, gun already drawn—rushed up to 50-year-old John T. Williams, who was hearing impaired in one ear, losing his eyesight, and held only a pocketknife and a piece of cedar, the tools of his trade. How Birk commanded Williams to drop the knife and, seven seconds into their encounter, fired five bullets, four striking and killing the woodcarver. How when other officers arrived they could see that the knife on the ground was closed.
Protests began almost immediately, Seattle’s streets a preview of the scenes a decade later, of Black Lives Matter and the long hunt for justice for those murdered by police. During the inquest, Officer Birk told jurors a story that contradicted that of eyewitnesses. Williams was menacing, Birk said, in attack mode, seconds from lunging with the knife.
The inquest left no one satisfied. At least one witness would remain traumatized for years, by both what she saw in the moments of the shooting and the lack of justice afterward. On the question of whether Officer Birk should be charged with a crime, the decision lay in the hands of the King County prosecutor. The choice he made haunted him in subsequent reelection bids, made his stomach burn whenever he talked about it. Most significantly the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the SPD’s discriminatory policing and overall use of force.
This one was hard to read. So often have the lives of Black and Indigenous persons of color ended the way John T. Williams's life did. I'm tired of it, the stress hurts some days, the wondering, the fear.
The only way accountability comes is to demand it.
Through it all, Rick Williams, the older brother turned family spokesman, clenched his jaw in every hearing, through every bad thing he heard about John, every time he saw a cop on the street and was expected to act like there was no bad blood. He held back his rage as much as he could, held it back even as he watched, like everyone else in the city, again and again, the video.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
Zandar's Tip Jar
If you like what you're reading, drop in two bits.
It's ZVTS, now in a 60-minute podcast!
Get your Zandar and Bon every Saturday and Wednesday!
Also, click on the iTunes button to put the show on
your iTunes podcast list and take us with you!
Or, check out the episode archive page!
Posts
