Last Call For Stone Cold Criminal, Con't

The prosecution in convicted Trump lackey Roger Stone's case filed sentencing recommendations last night for Stone for witness tampering in his role in the WikiLeaks DNC hack, and asked for seven to nine years in prison.  The Trump regime in the last 24 hours has gone completely insane with rage over the recommendation.

The Justice Department plans to reduce its sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Trump, after top officials professed to be blindsided by the seven-to-nine-year penalty prosecutors urged a judge to impose, a senior Justice Department official said Tuesday.

In a stunning rebuke of career prosecutors that immediately raised questions about political interference in the case, a senior Justice Department official said the department “was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation in the Roger Stone case last night.”

“That recommendation is not what had been briefed to the department,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. “The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses. The department will clarify its position later today.”

The statement came hours after Trump tweeted about the sentence prosecutors recommended, saying: “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” The senior Justice Department official, though, said the decision to revise prosecutors’ recommendation came before Trump’s tweet.

Stone was convicted by a jury in November of obstructing Congress and witness tampering. His was the last conviction secured by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Stone has been a friend and adviser to Trump since the 1980s and was a key figure in his 2016 campaign, working to discover damaging information on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

All four prosecutors who signed the sentencing memo have now left the Stone case over the DoJ overriding the recommendations, one has resigned from the DoJ completely in protest.

Four federal prosecutors dramatically quit the criminal case against Republican operative Roger Stone as the Department of Justice reduced their recommendation that a judge sentence the longtime ally of President Donald Trump to up to nine years in prison. 

In a revised sentencing memo filed Tuesday, Timothy Shea, U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., said Stone deserves to be sentenced to “far less” time in prison than what the four prosecutors, who worked under Shea, proposed Monday.

Jonathan Kravis, who delivered the closing argument at Stone’s trial last fall, resigned as an assistant U.S. Attorney, according to a court filing in Washington federal court. 

Kravis, who did not give a reason in the filing, will no longer work as a prosecutor for the federal government. 

The other three prosecutors, Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Marando, also withdrew from Stone’s case, according to their own separate filings, which did not explain their decision. 

But those three all will continue working for the federal government.

Marcy Wheeler believes this is being done to keep Stone from talking to the press.  It's not just helping a loyal lackey, it's self-preservation.  Trump doesn't just want to commute Stone's sentence or pardon Stone (or both!) but that he has to.
 

The trial itself provided ample evidence of what Mark Meadows considers “collusion” involving Donald Trump personally. It showed the campaign — and probably Trump personally — were working through Stone to optimize the WikiLeaks releases from the very day they came out on June 14, 2016. It showed that Stone was informing Trump personally about his efforts to optimize the releases. After some arm-twisting to adhere to his grand jury testimony, Steve Bannon testified he knew of all this, contrary to some of what he had said in earlier testimony that Trump would learn about. Erik Prince was in the loop. Gates testified that Stone was strategizing with Jared Kushner on all this. And it appears that Paul Manafort was in the loop, too.

But all that really damning evidence came out in a trial that only had to prove that Stone had lied to cover up the actions he took to optimize the release of the WikiLeaks emails. The trial did not need to explain what Stone’s actual back channel was, what he had to do to obtain it, and how involved Trump was in that process. And the trial did not explain it.

Indeed, there’s evidence I’ll lay out at more length in a follow-up that the government chose not to lay out all it knew. That is, it appears the government came to trial prepared to present evidence about the underlying “collusion,” but ultimately decided to hold it back for now.

At multiple times during the trial, however, the prosecution pointed to suspiciously timed phone calls, right before or after Stone discussed WikiLeaks with Gates, Manafort, or Jerome Corsi. Only Stone or Trump can tell us what happened between the two men, what Trump’s actual role in maximizing the degree to which his campaign benefitted from Russia’s theft of his opponent’s email.

Immediately after the trial, Stone made an intense effort to get Trump to pardon him, with his wife Nydia appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show to ask directly and a man with a vuvuzela inside the White House calling for a pardon gates.

Since that time, Stone was silent, until the time that the Probation Office provided the sentencing range for the crimes that was built in to the way that Mueller charged this just over a year ago. That is, by charging Stone with witness tampering, Mueller built in the possibility that Stone would be facing the steep sentence recommended yesterday. And that steep sentence may have been envisioned not as the sum of what Stone’s actual actions entailed — certainly every single warrant save the last four showed probable cause that Stone had done far more, but rather as leverage to get Stone to tell what he knows about Trump’s involvement in all this.

Bill Barr was brought in as AG to bury abundant evidence that Trump was personally involved in efforts to maximize the Russian operation, to deny all the ways that Trump did cheat to win. From his initial misleading claims in the wake of the report’s release, he was always suppressing the centrality of Roger Stone in all this.

So it’s fairly safe to conclude that DOJ’s reversal today is not just an effort to prevent a rich white man, Roger Stone, from facing the full consequences of his actions, but to prevent voters from learning what another rich white man did to cheat to get elected.

Yes, ultimately Trump will commute what is left of Roger Stone’s sentence, probably on November 4, just like he fired Jeff Sessions the day after the 2018 election. But I suspect that Roger Stone, rightly, isn’t going to leave anything to chance. And so neither can Bill Barr.

And some in Trumpland are saying that Dear Leader will pardon Stone even earlier, as soon as he is sentenced.

Democrats were quick to respond:

Schumer calls for IG probe into DOJ overruling prosecutors to give Roger Stone lighter sentence. Nadler says his panel will “get to the bottom” of it. Schiff says Trump administration represents “the gravest threat” to rule of law “in a generation.” McConnell declines to comment

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 11, 2020

We'll see.  The one thing that isn't in doubt is the obvious interference in Stone's case by the Trump regime, but that no longer matters in America, does it?

Retribution Execution, Con't

If the Trump regime can fabricate a scandal for Joe Biden to sink his 2020 chances and to threaten him with investigations and worse and get away with it, they can do the same to the one Republican who stood up and said no to these thugs, Mitt Romney.

And they are doing exactly that as we speak.

The MAGA machine is attempting to turn President Donald Trump’s latest nemesis — Sen. Mitt Romney — into the next Hunter Biden.

Trump in recent days took a new turn in his attacks on the Utah senator, veering from assailing his character and loyalty and tossing him into the wilds of Ukraine.

Trump over the weekend retweeted several conservative personalities and stories attempting to connect the Republican senator to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its former board member Hunter Biden, two parties at the center of Trump’s attempted quid pro quo. The allegation was featured in several far-right blog posts: A senior advisor from Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was on Burisma’s board of directors, and that by voting to impeach Trump last week, Romney was covering for his fellow swamp crony. 

While Trump’s campaign had highlighted the allegation earlier, the post-impeachment flurry of tweets was the first time that Trump himself acknowledged the theory. At one point, the president retweeted a random follower’s newfound suspicion: “Romney is covering up his part in corruption in Ukraine. This has nothing to do with truth or God. He is a desperate man. The truth will come out.”

Prior to Sunday, Trump and the GOP’s first anti-Mitt salvo centered on a familiar set of name-calling: Romney is a “failed presidential candidate” jealous that Trump won the presidency; Romney craves the attention of the liberal media; Romney, a sanctimonious do-gooder, is a coward who wears mom jeans.

The Burisma attack signaled a new front in Trump world’s attempts to punish Romney, as well as keep the Burisma narrative alive. After all, Trump’s attempted quid pro quo centered around his obsession with launching an investigation into whether Joe Biden, his ostensible rival in the 2020 election, illegally leaned on the Ukrainian government to protect his son’s board seat — a storyline Trump adamantly clung onto during his impeachment trial. Should Romney look complicit, then so much the better for explaining his vote.

“It’s a fact. Why shouldn’t they know?” Matt Wolking, the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director, said when asked why the official account retweeted a story about Romney’s adviser. He did not respond when asked whether this fact provided adequate context for Romney’s vote.

Romney is also facing trouble back home in Utah, where the state Republican party is looking to make an example of him.

Some conservative leaders of the Utah GOP have readied a resolution censuring Sen. Mitt Romney for voting to remove President Donald Trump from office and urging him to “vigorously support” Trump’s agenda or vacate his seat.

The draft resolution submitted Friday is expected to come up for discussion and a possible vote during the Feb. 29 Republican Party state central committee meeting.

Orem Republican Brandon Beckham, who submitted the resolution, said he “thought it was pretty obvious” that Trump was innocent of the charges leveled against him in the impeachment trial. Rather than sticking up for the president, Beckham argues, Romney sided with the Democrats.

"A lot of us feel that it's sort of an embarrassment to our party," Beckham said.

The resolution, co-sponsored by nine other state central committee members, notes that Trump endorsed Romney in his 2018 Senate race. It also notes that Romney used a covert Twitter account — under the alias “Pierre Delecto” — to like critical tweets about the president and alleges that this activity displayed a “pre-impeachment bias.”

Furthermore, Beckham contends, Romney’s decisions were at odds with the position of the Utah GOP, which in December passed a resolution that expressed full support of the president and called on congressional Republicans to stand by him.

“On February 5, 2020, despite zero evidence of a federal crime committed or any wrongdoing that rises to the level of removal of office, Senator Romney voted with Democrats to remove President Trump from office and as a direct result received praise and applause from Democrats on nationally televised interviews and the Democrat presidential debate,” Beckham’s resolution states.

While nine of the 187 central committee members have co-sponsored the resolution, Beckham said he expects most to vote in favor of the measure, given the president’s popularity.

Romney will have a lot more than just censure in his future.  Dear Leader Trump has to crush him utterly or he risks others defying his rule.  There are things Romney can do, but if he ends up persona non grata then he's just a ghost.

On the other hand, "Mitt Romney (UT-I)" could be...amusing.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

There's a non-zero chance that raging Islamophobic bigot Laura Loomer ends up a Republican Congresswoman from (where else) Florida in January, because the party of Trump isn't ever going to back down from being the party of white supremacist inchoate hatred.  Dean Obeidallah explains:

Donald Trump wants to be president forever. He made that clear again with his tweet on Wednesday that featured campaign signs of Trump for President extending from 2020 to 2048. But that scenario is not going to happen, barring Trump being able to somehow suspend the 22nd Amendment of our Constitution.

It’s clear though that regardless of how long Trump remains in the White House, he and many in his base want Trumpism—a celebration of cruelty, bigotry, and sexism—to continue long after he’s gone. That helps explain Trump’s support for anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 21st District—and, incredibly, is increasingly the likely GOP nominee. After all, anti-Muslim bigotry is one of the cornerstones of Trumpism.

Before we talk how Trump, Rep. Jim Jordan, GOP Florida officials, and even a Trump Fox News ally are promoting Loomer, let me give you a Loomer primer. First, she’s not the least bit bashful about her efforts to stoke hate against Muslims.

In 2017, she bragged on Twitter about being a “#ProudIslamophobe,” as she called Muslims “savages,” calling for a ban on allowing Muslims into America “EVER AGAIN.” She has called Islam a “cancer,” and worse, she wrote that there’s “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same.” Loomer dangerously wants you to believe that a Muslim American like myself is no different than a person in ISIS.

Loomer, who once worked for the right-wing group Project Veritas, seems to especially despise immigrant Muslims, tweeting in 2017, “Someone needs to create a non-Islamic version of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” That resulted in her being banned from Uber and Lyft for violating its community standards, which prompted Loomer to tweet, “Uber will literally hire an Islamic terrorist, but they will ban a conservative journalist for addressing legitimate safety concerns.”

In 2019, Loomer took to Instagram, where she made a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in vile terms, blaming all Muslims including Omar for 9/11, and adding, “Muslims should not even be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country.”

Beyond social media, in October 2018 Loomer praised and appeared with self-professed Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, who has claimed in the past that homosexuality facilitated the Holocaust and openly recited and defended the “14 word” mantra used by white supremacists. Loomer also trespassed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s property in January 2019 along with her colleague, Charlottesville Unite the Right marcher Antonio Foreman, to denounce her refusal to support Trump’s wall. While on Pelosi’s property, Loomer reportedly made racist comments about Latinos.

Loomer’s history of spewing hate online resulted in her being banned in the past year from just about every social media platform out there. In November 2018 Twitter banned Loomer for violating its rules against hateful conduct. In May 2019 Loomer was banned by both Facebook and Instagram, along with others who had used these platforms to promote haters, such as Louis Farrakhan for repeated anti-Semitic statements, and Paul Nehlen, the Wisconsin businessman who ran for Congress and continually spewed white supremacist garbage.

I think you get the idea. Loomer is someone who, in the times before Trump, would’ve been marginalized to the fringes of society along with other bigots and racists. But these aren’t normal times. This is the time of Trump, and Loomer is Trumpism personified. She fits perfectly in today’s party of Trump which is why in August 2019 she announced her run for Congress as a Republican to take on Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel in the Palm Beach-area district. Loomer describes Frankel as “a staunch obstructionist and critic of President Donald J. Trump.”

Now, the good news is Lois Frankel has a solidly Democratic district (D+9 on the Cook PVI) and multiple signs point to Loomer being so toxic that she loses.  But let's remember that Illinois Republicans ran Actual Nazi Art Jones in 2018, and ran raging Islamophobic bigot Duncan Hunter who actually won (before being indicted and taking a plea deal for his corruption).

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from Wuhan coronavirus has exceeded 1,000 as some 43,000 cases have now been reported worldwide from the illness.
• Donald Trump wants to personally approve the designs for all new federal buildings as critics are attacking the executive order plan.
• The Justice Department is filing new lawsuits over sanctuary cities as Attorney General Barr declared the legal action to be a "significant escalation" against local governments.
• Democratic primary voters take to the ballot box in New Hampshire today as Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are leading in polls.
• NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion to complete its goal of putting a manned mission to the Moon in 2024 as the Trump budget proposed sharp cuts to the space agency.

Last Call For Operation Mindbender

Last month when Trump was on the brink of a shooting war with Iran, Tehran attacked an Iraqi base where US soldiers were housed.  At the time, we were told that US personnel had been evacuated and that there were no casualties.  But like every single thing this regime tells us, it was a lie and American troops are now suffering from brain injuries from the attack...over 100 such cases.

The U.S. military is preparing to report a more than 50% jump in cases of traumatic brain injury stemming from Iran’s missile attack on a base in Iraq last month, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement, said there were over 100 cases of TBI, up from the 64 previously reported last month.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but in the past had said to expect an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms can take time to manifest and troops can sometimes take longer to report them.

No U.S. troops were killed or faced immediate bodily injury when Iran fired missiles at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport on Jan. 3.

The missile attacks capped a spiral of violence that had started in late December. Both sides have refrained from further military escalation, but the mounting number of U.S. casualties could increase pressure on the Trump administration to respond, perhaps non-militarily.

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that the service members suffering from traumatic brain injuries had been diagnosed with mild cases. He added the diagnosis could change as time went on.

Symptoms of concussive injuries include headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and nausea.

Pentagon officials have repeatedly said there has been no effort to minimize or delay information on concussive injuries. But the disclosures following Tehran’s attack has renewed questions over the U.S. military’s policy regarding how it internally reports suspected brain injuries and whether they are treated publicly with the same urgency as loss of limb or life.

U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to play down the brain injuries last month, saying he “heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things” following the attack, prompting criticism from lawmakers and a U.S. veterans group.

These are serious injuries that can lead to major future problems.  Trump is treating this like it was these troops getting a migraine headache.  Our troops deserve a better Commander-in-Chief, that's for damn sure.

Austerity Hysteria, Con't

We warned you time and time again (and I say we because a hell of a lot of Democrats warned you this was coming) that the Trump Tax Scam was going to be followed by massive, draconian cuts and lo and behold, Trump's 2020 budget goes straight after Medicaid, food programs, and more with trillions in cuts.

President Donald Trump‘s budget request on Monday will pitch billions of dollars in cuts to non-defense spending despite a budget deal he already negotiated with Congress, in addition to seeking major savings by targeting the federal safety net, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Sunday.

Trump also will ask Congress for a slight spending increase for the Pentagon as he releases his $4.8 trillion budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year, all proposals sure to be rejected by Democrats who control the House.

The president aims to cut $4.4 trillion in spending over a decade and projects an end to annual deficits in 15 years, rather than a more aggressive 10-year goal. Much of the savings would stem from the Trump administration’s push to overhaul food stamp benefits and cap Medicaid spending, among other reforms. The federal deficit is forecast to blow past $1 trillion this year.
Trump will also ask Congress for an extra $2 billion for border wall construction, in addition to billions in funding hikes for immigration enforcement.

Democrats will never agree to carve up domestic programs for savings, and it will be up to Congress to decide on final fiscal 2021 spending levels. While the president is looking for significantly less border money than last year, any increase is still bound to spark a fight with Democrats, as will the extra cash for immigration enforcement.

The two-year budget deal forged by Congress and the Trump administration last summer cemented $738 billion in fiscal 2020 funding for the military and $632 billion for non-defense departments. Federal funding limits will be even higher — but still tight — for the fiscal year that begins in October, allowing an extra $2.5 billion for the military and another $2.5 billion bump for non-defense programs, under the agreement

Trump is instead pushing for cuts to the non-defense spending level that he negotiated with Congress, bringing that level down to $590 billion, while maintaining military funding at $740.5 billion.

As with his previous budget proposals, Trump is once again seeking deep and unrealistic cuts to a number of federal agency budgets, and the cuts are unlikely to be embraced by Congress.

For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development would see a 15 percent cut, the Commerce Department’s budget would be reduced by 37 percent after the completion of the 2020 census and foreign aid would be reduced by about a fifth.

I mean maybe Trump forgot it was an election year, because $2 trillion in domestic spending cuts and forcing Republicans to vote on those cuts is exactly what helped hand Democrats the House in 2018, well that and voting on gutting Medicaid expansion and taking health care access away from millions.  Republicans are about to do it again.

We'll see how many Americans will vote to hurt themselves in order to hurt others even more.

Shamrocked At The Ballot Box

Ireland's Sinn Fein took the plurality of votes in weekend national elections and the current government of PM Leo Faradkar and his Fianna Fail party now have a new junior partner, whether they like it or not.

Irish nationalists Sinn Fein demanded on Sunday to be part of the next Irish government after early results indicated the left-wing party secured the most votes in an election that leader Mary Lou McDonald described as a ballot box “revolution”.

The former political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which has recast itself as the main left-wing party, secured 24% of first-preference votes, almost doubling its share from the last election in 2016, early results showed.

That put it narrowly ahead of the party of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and fellow center-right rival Fianna Fail in an election analysts described as a seismic shift away from Ireland’s century-old, center-right duopoly.

But Sinn Fein is likely to fall behind at least one of its rivals in terms of seat numbers because it stood far fewer candidates and is unlikely to be more than a junior partner in a government.

“This is certainly an election that is historic... this is changing the shape and the mold of Irish politics. This is just the beginning,” McDonald told reporters after arriving at her election count to a huge ovation from party supporters.

She said Sinn Fein would talk to all parties about forming a government and that others should accept their responsibility to do the same.

“I do not accept the exclusion or talk of excluding our party, a party that represents now a quarter of the electorate and I think that is fundamentally undemocratic,” she said.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, who have between them led every government since the foundation of the state, ruled out a coalition with Sinn Fein before the election.

But although Varadkar reiterated his rejection due to “principle and policy”, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin declined to repeat earlier refusals to consider a coalition with Sinn Fein, saying only that there were significant incompatibilities on policy.

“Our policies and our principles have not changed overnight,” he said. “But what is important is that the country comes first.”

We'll see what kind of government gets formed in the wake of this, but for Sinn Fein to come in first is watching the earth move in Ireland, especially in a post-Brexit era.  I'm nowhere near versed enough in Irish politics to know if McDonald can become PM or not, but whoever does lead Ireland's government from here on will have to contend with her party being part of it.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus is now over 900 as the first American casualty has been confirmed by Chinese health officials, a US citizen died in Wuhan over the weekend from the illness.
• Voting results in Switzerland show overwhelming referendum win for laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ citizens, despite adamant opposition from the right-wing Swiss People's Party.
• A bankruptcy deal between US officials and Puerto Rico would cut the island's debt by $24 billion, but faces opposition from Gov. Wanda Vazquez over making pension cuts permanent.
• The Iowa Democratic party officially has South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg winning the most state delegates in last week's caucus as candidates head to New Hampshire for Tuesday's vote.
• New lithium-ion battery technology could be in consumer products in the next year or so, with 20% better charge performance in electronics and the potential for much more in electric vehicles.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham did the rounds on the Sunday shows today making it very clear what's going to happen to Trump's enemies list.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Justice Department has created a process through which Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, can submit information he collected in Ukraine to be vetted.

"The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy," Graham, of South Carolina, said on "Face the Nation." "[Attorney General Bill Barr] told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified."
Graham, a key ally of the president's, said he spoke with Barr on Sunday morning, as well as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. He said they urged him to "take very cautiously" information from Ukraine against Republicans and Democrats.

"If Rudy Giuliani has any information coming out of the Ukraine, he needs to turn it over to the Department of Justice because it could be Russian propaganda," Graham said, making a stern plea for Giuliani and all U.S. politicians to be wary of that information because it "may be backed by Russian misinformation."

When pressed on whether Giuliani is being "played" by the Russians, the South Carolina senator said he didn't know.

"I'm telling Rudy, you think you've got the goods? Don't give it to me, because what do we know? We know the Russian disinformation campaign was used against President Trump. They hacked into the DNC system, not the Ukrainians, and they're on the ground all over the world trying to affect democracy," Graham said.

The Biden hearings are going to happen, and soon.  Right in the middle of the primary campaign. That's a major problem, of course.

But Graham made it much clearer last night what will happen to those involved in Trump's impeachment.

Lindsey Graham: Half the people behind the Russia investigation are going to go to jail pic.twitter.com/Xi9LQV6J9M

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) February 9, 2020

This is the part where Trump starts having people arrested.  And why not?  Who will stop him at this point?

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Meanwhile, in Trump's America, white nationalist groups are freely marching down the streets of Washington DC with police escorts.

A march by the white nationalist group Patriot Front was done near Union Station in Washington around 4 p.m. on Saturday.

The members of Patriot Front that were marching shouted, "Reclaim America" as they moved down the streets of D.C. The group would later end their march at a Walmart in the Union Station area, as some onlookers called them cowards, said WUSA9's Mike Valerio.

Those marching wore similar long-sleeve clothing, wit hats, masks, sunglasses and American flags. They were trailed and surrounded by police officers who were there to de-escalate any issues that arose.

The group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism.

The SPLC added that Patriot Front focuses on "theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country."

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front formed as a white nationalist hate group following the "Unite the Right" in August 2017 that left one woman dead in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This is not the first time the group has protested in Washington. According to the group's website, it was in D.C. June 2019 for remembrance of the USS Liberty on the 52nd anniversary of its attack by the State of Israel.

It's happening in our nation's capital.  Something that would have been worldwide news and universally condemned during the Obama era and unthinkable before that.  It's now a ho-hum occurrence in the Trump regime.

White nationalists, Patriot Front, marched through DC yesterday. Many had their faces covered in white masks while chanting “reclaim America.”

Their parade of racism and extremism cost taxpayers at least 2.6M.
pic.twitter.com/c9j7op8ekh

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) February 9, 2020

White masks.  Guarded by cops.  The police are used to protect the white nationalists.

This is America.  The quiet white nationalism part of this country is once again being said out loud in marches and rallies, and brown and black bodies always suffer badly in the eras where that happens.

Spoilers: the eras where that happens comprise the vast majority of this country's history.  This isn't new. This is America reverting to the historical mean.

Sunday Long Read: Follow The Funny Money, Honey

This week's Sunday Long read comes to us from the NY Times Magazine, where Dave Enrich  gives us an excerpt from his new book on the subject, Dark Towers, and the story of Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank, and a man named Mike Offit.

The roughly $425 million that Offit helped arrange for Trump back in 1998 was the start of a very long, very complicated relationship between ­Deutsche Bank and the future president. Over the course of two decades, the bank lent him more than $2 billion — so much that by the time he was elected, ­Deutsche Bank was by far his biggest creditor. Against all odds, Trump paid back most of what he owed the bank. But the relationship cemented ­Deutsche Bank’s reputation as a reckless institution willing to do business with clients nobody else would touch. And it has made the company a magnet for prosecutors, regulators and lawmakers hoping to penetrate the president’s opaque financial affairs.

Last April, congressional Democrats subpoenaed ­Deutsche Bank for its records on Trump, his family members and his businesses. The Trump family sued to block the bank from complying; after two federal courts ruled against the Trumps, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with oral arguments expected in the spring. State prosecutors, meanwhile, are investigating the bank’s ties with Trump, too. The F.B.I. has been conducting its own wide-­ranging investigation of ­Deutsche Bank, and people connected to the bank told me they have been interviewed by special agents about aspects of the Trump relationship.

If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.

One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. ­Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know.

Until the 1990s, ­Deutsche Bank was a provincial German company with a limited presence outside Europe. Today it is a $1.5 trillion colossus, one of the world’s largest banks, with offices in 59 countries — and, thanks to its well-­documented pattern of violating laws, an international symbol of greed, recklessness and hubris. Its rap sheet includes manipulating international currency markets; playing a central role in rigging a crucial benchmark interest rate known as Libor; whisking billions of dollars in and out of Iran, Syria, Myanmar and other countries in violation of sanctions; laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Russian oligarchs, among many others; and misleading customers, investors and American, German and British regulators.

­Deutsche Bank’s envelope-­pushing helped it become the global power player it is today, but it also left the company dangerously frail. Its books remain stuffed with trillions of dollars of risky derivatives — the sort of instruments that many other banks have disposed of since the 2008 financial crisis but that persist as a kind of unexploded ordnance in ­Deutsche Bank’s accounts, threatening to inflict severe damage on the bank and the broader financial system if something were to cause them to detonate. Its financial cushions to absorb future shocks are threadbare. Its core businesses are not performing well; the bank lost $5.8 billion last year. Because of Deutsche Bank’s size and its connections with hundreds of other major banks around the world, serious problems could spread, virus­like, to other financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund a few years ago branded ­Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” in the global banking system.
­Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump, rather than being an odd outlier, is a kind of object lesson in how the bank lost its way. The company was hungry for growth, especially in the United States, and it was happy to cozy up to clients that better-­established players viewed as too damaged or dangerous. Along the way, it missed one opportunity after another to extricate itself from the Trump relationship or at least slow its expansion. With hindsight, the procession of miscues and bad decisions appears almost comical.

I have spent the past two years interviewing dozens of ­Deutsche Bank executives about the Trump relationship, among other subjects. Quite a few look back at the relationship with a mixture of anger and regret. They blame a small group of bad bankers for blundering into a trap that would further damage ­Deutsche Bank’s name and guarantee years of political and prosecutorial scrutiny. But that isn’t quite right; in fact, the Trump relationship was repeatedly blessed by executives up and down the bank’s organizational ladder. The cumulative effect of those decisions is that a German company — one that most Americans have probably never heard of — played a large role in positioning a strapped businessman to become president of the United States.

Without Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump would have been a failed real estate tycoon who ended up bankrupt and broke.  He would have been a cautionary tale of greed.

Instead he is in the White House.

That alone makes them the Holy Grail of Trump's dark secrets.

Retribution Execution, Con't

When the sexual predator mob boss in the White House behaves badly and gets away with it through cover-up, his sexual predator underlings behave badly and cover up their crimes too.

The Veterans Affairs Department’s inspector general is reviewing a request from a top House leader to investigate allegations that VA Secretary Robert Wilkie sought to dig up dirt on one of the congressman’s aides after she said she was sexually assaulted at VA’s Washington hospital.

The appeal late Friday from House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano (D-Calif.) came after he received information from a senior VA official, confirmed by The Washington Post, that Wilkie worked to discredit the credibility of the aide, senior policy adviser Andrea Goldstein.

Wilkie, who led the Pentagon’s vast personnel and readiness operation before his VA appointment, quietly began inquiring with military officials last fall about Goldstein’s past, according to three people with knowledge of his efforts. That is when Goldstein said a man groped and propositioned her in the main lobby of VA Medical Center in Washington.

Authorities closed the case in January without bringing charges.

Over several months, Wilkie shared his findings with his senior staff at morning meetings on at least six occasions, three current or former senior VA officials confirmed. Wilkie said his inquiry found that the Navy veteran, who currently serves as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, had filed multiple complaints while in the service, according to three people with knowledge of what Wilkie said. Wilkie also served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

The information shared with Takano’s committee and with The Post said Wilkie was concerned with Goldstein’s “credibility and military record.” The VA official who shared it said Wilkie described Goldstein to his staff as a “serial sexual assault/harassment complainant in the Navy who made baseless allegations, for example, when she was not satisfied with a fitness evaluation.”

“The strong inference was made that all were false allegations,” the VA official wrote. A fitness evaluation in the military is the equivalent of a civilian performance review.

In an interview with The Post, Goldstein disputed she had made numerous complaints. She said she filed a formal complaint with the Navy just once, before her experience at the VA hospital. The Post typically does not name people who report a sexual assault but Goldstein has spoken publicly about her experiences.

The information given to Takano’s committee was done anonymously, but The Post has determined it was sent by a senior VA official. The allegations were first reported by ProPublica.

Wilkie suggested to several people on his staff, including his public affairs chief, that they use the information he collected to discredit Goldstein, a current and former senior official said. They declined.

So to recap, Andrea Goldstein, policy director to the chair of the committee that oversees the VA, was allegedly sexually assaulted in the lobby of DC's VA hospital. The investigation into the assault was closed while the VA Secretary then personally tried to discredit the aide multiple times by digging up her former Navy record and tried to use it against her. There are several witnesses to the Secretary's multiple suggestions to use information to discredit Goldstein.

In any other administration, Wilkie would have resigned within hours of this story being printed.

But this is the Trump regime.  Retribution is a way of life, and it comes from the sexual criminal at the top.

And of course, the people who were supposed to stop Trump are shocked to now discover that he doesn't give a damn about what they think anymore as they no longer have anything to offer him.

A handful of Republican senators tried to stop President Trump from firing Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who testified in the House impeachment hearings, but the president relieved the diplomat of his post anyway, according to people briefed on the discussions.
The senators were concerned that it would look bad for Mr. Trump to dismiss Mr. Sondland and argued that it was unnecessary, since the ambassador was already talking with senior officials about leaving after the Senate trial, the people said. The senators told White House officials that Mr. Sondland should be allowed to depart on his own terms, which would have reduced any political backlash.

But Mr. Trump evidently was not interested in a quiet departure, choosing instead to make a point by forcing Mr. Sondland out before the ambassador was ready to go. When State Department officials called Mr. Sondland on Friday to tell him that he had to resign that day, he resisted, saying that he did not want to be included in what seemed like a larger purge of impeachment witnesses, according to the people informed about the matter.

Mr. Sondland conveyed to the State Department officials that if they wanted him gone that day, they would have to fire him. And so the president did, ordering the ambassador recalled from his post effective immediately. Mr. Sondland’s dismissal was announced just hours after another impeachment witness, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, were marched out of the White House by security officers and told their services were no longer needed.

The ousters came two days after the Republican-led Senate acquitted Mr. Trump on two articles of impeachment stemming from his effort to pressure Ukraine to incriminate Democratic rivals. Outraged Democrats called the firings a “Friday night massacre” aimed at taking revenge against government officials who had no choice but to testify under subpoena about what they knew.

Among the Republicans who warned the White House was Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who after voting to acquit Mr. Trump said she thought he had learned a lesson. Others included Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Martha McSally of Arizona and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday but a senior administration official confirmed the senators’ outreach.

And every one of these senators voted to make sure Trump they would never hold him responsible.

Hell, I don't believe these spineless clods told Trump a damn thing, because they cower in fear whenever he's around.

Last Call For Sunny Side Up

This weekend is the scheduled launch of the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar Orbiter project to take a look at the sun and in particular, the sun's magnetic poles.

The mission, which is a joint collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, is currently expected to launch shortly after 11 p.m. ET Sunday. This is the first mission that will provide images of the sun's north and south poles using a suite of six instruments on board that will capture the spacecraft's view. Having a visual understanding of the sun's poles is important because it can provide more insight about the sun's powerful magnetic field and how it affects Earth. 

It will take Solar Orbiter about two years to reach its highly elliptical orbit around the sun. Gravity assists from Earth and Venus will help swing the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane, or the space that aligns with the sun's equator, so it can study the sun's poles from above and below. 

This follows the Ulysses spacecraft, another collaboration between ESA and NASA that launched in 1990 and also flew over the sun's poles. Ulysses completed three passes of the sun before its mission ended in 2009, but its view was limited to what it could see from the sun's equator. 

"Up until Solar Orbiter, all solar imaging instruments have been within the ecliptic plane or very close to it," said Russell Howard, space scientist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. and principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter's ten instruments. "Now, we'll be able to look down on the sun from above."

"It will be terra incognita," said Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist for the mission at the Agency's European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. "This is really exploratory science." 

Solar Orbiter is equipped with ten instruments that can capture observations of the sun's corona (which is its atmosphere), the poles and the solar disk. It can also use its variety of instruments to measure the sun's magnetic fields and solar wind, or the energized stream of particles emitted by the sun that reach across our solar system. 

Understanding the sun's magnetic field and solar wind are key because they contribute to space weather, which impacts Earth by interfering with networked systems like GPS, communications and even astronauts on the International Space Station. The sun's magnetic field is so massive that it stretches beyond Pluto, providing a pathway for solar wind to travel directly across the solar system. 

The mission will work in tandem with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which is currently orbiting the sun on a seven-year mission and just completed its fourth close approach of the star. It launched in August 2018 and will eventually come within four million miles of the sun -- the closest a spacecraft has ever flown by our star.

Here's hoping the project has a safe launch and a fruitful mission.  Lord knows we need all the additional science knowledge we can get right about now.

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Retribution Execution, Con't

Expect much more retribution by Trump against anyone involved in the House impeachment proceedings as his enemies list grows by the day.

Several other officials who testified during the House impeachment inquiry have left the government, including former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch; William B. Taylor Jr., her replacement; vice presidential aide Jennifer Williams; State Department official Michael McKinley; special envoy for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker; and NSC official Tim Morrison. 

More firings are possible. 

The president and his advisers have also discussed removing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, though no final decision has been made, officials said. Trump has expressed frustration that Atkinson allowed a whistleblower report documenting Trump’s alleged misconduct toward Ukraine to be transmitted to Congress. 

Some advisers have also counseled the president to remove Victoria Coates, the deputy national security adviser, who has told others in the White House that she fears her job is in jeopardy. 

Trump has regularly asked aides to continue slashing the size of the NSC, and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has said he plans to do so, telling NPR in an interview last month that the policy staff, which he put at about 180 people when he took over in September, was bloated. 

By the end of February, O’Brien said, he hoped to have cut it by a third. A senior administration official said there will be widespread departures at the NSC in the next week.

Intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson in particular has multiple bullseyes on him, at least according to Trump State TV.

According to an exclusive report from Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is threatening to take action against Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson over his handling of the whistleblower’s complaint, giving him until February 14 to comply with congressional requests for documents.

“I will be referring this matter for investigation by the Department of Justice if you once again refuse to comply,” Nunes wrote in a letter. 

“The investigation is particularly focused on the guidelines that appeared on a whistleblower complaint submission form that was changed — after the submission of the whistleblower complaint — to eliminate language excluding hearsay information,” Nunes added. 

According to Fox News, House Intelligence Committee Republicans are investigating Atkinson’s “unusual handling” of the complaint, which was the key component of the Democrats’ impeachment effort against President Trump.

Going after Atkinson with not only possible termination but with threatened prosecution represents a dangerous next step in Trump collecting heads.   It's not just witnesses he's trying to destroy, but the people whose job it is to watchdog the intelligence community to make sure it's held responsible.  If Trump is allowed to hang Atkinson out to dry, he will move on to the next step.

If there are any protections and defenses for civil servants left in our government, they will be tested to the breaking point this month.

That's important because the next step after Atkinson could be going after the people who actually impeached Trump.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

How long before FBI Director Chris Wray is told to drop this white supremacist terrorism assessment or lose his job?

The FBI has elevated its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a "national threat priority" for fiscal year 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray said Wednesday. He said the FBI is placing the risk of violence from such groups "on the same footing" as threats posed to the country by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and its sympathizers.
"Not only is the terror threat diverse — it's unrelenting," Wray said at an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, or domestic terrorists motivated by racial or religious hatred, make up a "huge chunk" of the FBI's domestic terrorism investigations, Wray said in statements before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last November. The majority of those attacks are "fueled by some type of white supremacy," he said.

Wednesday, Wray said combating domestic terrorism and its "close cousin," hate crimes, are at the "top of the priority list" for the FBI.

His statements indicate the FBI is just as concerned about racially-motivated violent extremists, including white supremacists, as it is about the threat posed by homegrown violent extremists inspired by foreign terrorist organizations. Wray said both pose a grave threat because the perpetrators are often "lone actors," self-radicalized online, who often look to attack "soft targets" such as public gatherings, retail locations or houses of worship.

In many cases, perpetrators can move quickly from rhetoric to violence, Wray said.

"They choose easily accessible weapons — a car, a knife, a gun, maybe an IED they can build crudely off the internet — and they choose soft targets," Wray said. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now."

Racially-motivated violent extremists were the primary source of ideologically-motivated violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001, Wray said in a statement Wednesday.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have evolved on the issue of threats posed by domestic extremists over the last year or so, reports CBS News' Jeff Pegues, and federal law enforcement officials have faced criticism that they've been sluggish in their response to the increased risk posed by white supremacists and other racially-motivated violent extremists. The public message from federal law enforcement has changed as the threats have intensified.

In March of 2019, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted Islamist militants such as al-Qaida and ISIS, and those inspired by them in the U.S., remained the country's "primary terrorist threat," but said the department was focused on all kinds of violent extremism.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump mentioned the fight against "radical Islamic terrorism" but not the terror threat fueled by other forms of hate.

I can't imagine Wray will still be FBI Director for too much longer.   House Republicans are already gunning for him, which means Senate Republicans will be too.

The head of the FBI on Wednesday batted back criticism from House Republicans that he hadn't done enough to reform the law enforcement agency after the release of a report that detailed the bureau's failures in the Russia investigation. 

In his first public testimony on Capitol Hill since the release of the Justice Department's inspector general report late last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray was critical of the officials accused of wrongdoing in the report, and outlined a number of steps he was making to change protocol at the agency as a result. 

But his response before the House Judiciary Committee was too tepid for a number of conservative lawmakers, who demanded a "thorough and complete public house cleaning" and a "clear, unambiguous expression of moral outrage." 

President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress have seized on the findings in the inspector general report about a series of errors made by the FBI as it sought a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has said that he did not have enough evidence to conclude the motivation behind those errors, and the attorney general has suggested they could have been made in "bad faith." 

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, drew audible protests from lawmakers after declaring he'd lost trust in the agency after the findings of the Horowitz report. 

"I don't trust your agency anymore. And that's a profound thing for me to say, because I was raised to revere the FBI," McClintock said.

The FISA "mismanagement" will be the official reason Wray is fired, but the reality will be that Trump will want an FBI director completely loyal to him not the FBI rank and file or to law enforcement.  He needs somebody as crooked as Bill Barr, and Wray still has slivers of his soul.

No, Trump will dump Wray going forward.  He won't stop at retaliation against impeachment witnesses.  He'll need an FBI Director willing to send people to kick down doors of more powerful people on his enemies list.  Friday night was only the beginning.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

As Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart opines, Trump's State of the Union speech was coded gaslighting to his white supremacist base, ignoring the Native, black, Hispanic, and Asian people that already made America great, and what non-white Americans suffered for in the ongoing struggle for equality.

Under any other president, the end of that annual speech before a joint session of Congress is a clarion call to unity, a moment of national reassurance. That’s certainly what Trump was going for during his 78-minute oration. I’m certain that’s the way it came off to his supporters. Yet, despite its visual and rhetorical messaging to African Americans, I heard something more sinister. What I heard was a white supremacist vision of America that alternately erased and whitewashed its history.

“This is the home of Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt, of many great generals including Washington, Pershing, Patton and MacArthur. This is the home of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong and so many more,” Trump said, tossing in Douglass and Tubman like a couple of Skittles in a bucket of milk. 

“The American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest and most determined men and women ever to walk on the face of the Earth,” Trump said, as though such conquest wasn’t financed by slavery and didn’t involve the horrific annihilation of the indigenous people here long before whites fled their own persecution and poverty in Europe.

“Our ancestors braved the unknown; tamed the wilderness; settled the Wild West; lifted millions from poverty, disease and hunger; vanquished tyranny and fascism; ushered the world to new heights of science and medicine; laid down the railroads, dug out the canals, raised up the skyscrapers,” Trump said. “And, ladies and gentlemen, our ancestors built the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history, and we are making it greater than ever before.”

When the words “we” and “our ancestors” tumble out of Trump’s mouth, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. For his “we” and “our” come off as a clarion call to whiteness. Trump’s “canvas” and “masterpiece,” as he depicted our nation, are devoid of the actual color and complexity that make art and America great. Instead, the president painted a Potemkin paradise where the rest of us deal with the consequences of his lies, white nationalism and vindictiveness. Given Trump and the people around him, I can only believe this was intentional.

After all, Trump put white nationalists on staff. Stephen K. Bannon was his chief White House strategist, and Stephen Miller remains in the West Wing driving the president’s hard-right anti-immigration stance. And need I remind you that Trump said that the neo-Nazis and other assorted white nationalists who unleashed racial and anti-Semitic terror on Charlottesville in 2017 included some “very fine people”? During an Oval Office meeting the following year, he referred to a group of nonwhite nations as “shithole countries.” Last summer, on Twitter, Trump demanded that the four congresswomen of color who make up “the Squad” “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Never mind that all four are U.S. citizens, and three of them were born in this country.

Post contributing columnist Danielle Allen also focused on the last part of Trump’s speech. She, too, noticed how his peroration erased America of its gorgeous mosaic and complicated history. “Can we sing America together so that we are all in the song?” she asked. “We all love a version of this country, but who has a heart big enough to sing the whole thing?” “The whole thing” being a majestic anthem filled with high notes that exalt in our historic accomplishments and low notes that recall the pain and injustice that made many of them possible.

Trump cannot sing that song, nor does he want to be a part of composing it. The song he’s singing is for whites only. He’s incapable of singing anything else.

On top of his corruption, self-dealing, misogyny and racism, Trump is a power-hungry autocrat.  Never forget that he's willing to sacrifice every single one of us for himself.

Last Call For The Ivanka Job

The gaslighting propaganda deluge of garbage that Ivanka Trump is somehow responsible for "millions of jobs being created" is one of the most laughable lies of the Trump regime, and yet industry groups are absolutely pretending she's singlehandedly powers the economy by herself.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is giving Ivanka Trump, the president's elder daughter and a White House adviser, an award for supporting manufacturing.

Trump will be the inaugural recipient of the association’s Alexander Hamilton Award. The new accolade marks the 125th anniversary of NAM and comes as the group launches its Creators Wanted workforce campaign to recognize leaders in manufacturing.

“Ivanka Trump embodies the collaborative spirit and relentless drive needed to solve manufacturers’ most pressing challenge — the workforce crisis. Like no one in government has ever done, she has provided singular leadership and shown an unwavering commitment to modern manufacturing in America,” NAM President Jay Timmons said in a statement.

She will receive her award on Wednesday in Washington at NAM’s Creators Wanted kick off.

“America is home to the best workforce in the world, but the skills of today do not mirror those of tomorrow. I am committed to ensuring our workforce is equipped with the skills they need to seize the vast opportunities that lie ahead,” Trump said in a statement.

She joined NAM's Manufacturing Institute in September to announce a major expansion of a skills training and apprenticeship program created by Toyota Motor North America.

This is ludicrous. Ivanka Trump has done absolutely nothing other than multiple failed lines of clothing and shoes trading off her father's name, and yet she's somehow the smartest businesswoman on Earth now?

Do people believe this nonsense?

From Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration through the end of November 2019, the American economy added a total of about 6.2 million jobs. But during a speech at a White House event on paid family leave on Thursday, the president credited his daughter, Ivanka Trump, with personally creating more than twice as many jobs over the same timespan.

“14 million people she’s gotten jobs for,” Trump said, referring to Ivanka. “Her goal when she started it two years ago was 500,000 jobs. She’s done over 14 million, so that’s really something.”

FOURTEEN MILLION JOBS?!? 

Have we gone insane?  What kind of North Korean reality warping is going on here?

The Klep-Trump-Cracy, Con't

House Democrats had their particular emoluments lawsuit dismissed outright at the DC Circuit over lack of standing.

A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit from Congressional Democrats who accused President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution by receiving profits from foreign governments' spending at his luxury Washington hotel and other businesses.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision did not address the legality of Trump's business dealings, but held that the more than 200 Democratic senators and House members who banded together in 2017 to bring the suit against the president lacked legal standing to do so.

The unanimous ruling from an ideologically diverse three-judge panel suggested that if the House or Senate had formally authorized the suit, it may have been allowed to proceed, but the lawmakers acting as plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to pursue it on their own.

"Only an institution can assert an institutional injury," the court wrote in its brief, 12-page decision.

Trump quickly lauded the decision.

"We just won the big emoluments case," the president told reporters on the south lawn of the White House as he departed for a trip to North Carolina. "It was a total win... It was another phony case and we won it, three to nothing."

"Another win just in. Nervous Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress sued me, thrown out. This one unanimous, in the D.C. Circuit," he added later in a post to his Twitter account.

The lawmakers could seek review by the full bench of the D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court, but it seems more likely that the battle over Trump's private businesses' receipts from foreign sources will continue through other cases currently pending at two other federal appeals courts. Lawyers for the Congressional Democrats signaled they may continue the fight beyond Friday's ruling.

“We're disappointed in the panel's decision and are considering next steps," said Elizabeth Wydra, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center and a member of the legal team that helped represent Democrats in the case. "It is important to recognize that today’s ruling is not a decision on the merits. The Court of Appeals did not in any way approve of President Trump’s repeated and flagrant violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.

This was always the longest of the shots against Trump's self-dealing, the latest of which is news that the Secret Service is regularly paying Trump's hotels $650 a night.

President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts.

Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government. When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J., the service needs space to post guards and store equipment.

Trump’s company says it charges only minimal fees. But Secret Service records do not show that.

At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, dozens more times in 2018, according to documents from Trump’s visits.

And at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property, an unusually high rent for homes in that area, according to receipts from 2017. Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there.

These payments appear to contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year.

Trump scams US taxpayers, and he takes foreign money for pay-for-play schemes.  That's never been in doubt, but the legal struggle is designed to make sure it never is settled.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Trump continues to collect heads for his wall now that he's been crowned by the Senate GOP, and the next name on the list is Alexander Vindman, who testified in the House impeachment proceedings.

President Trump is preparing to push out a national security official who testified against him during the impeachment inquiry after he expressed deep anger on Thursday over the attempt to remove him from office because of his actions toward Ukraine.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — a National Security Council aide who testified during House Democrats’ impeachment hearings — will be informed in the coming days, likely on Friday, by administration officials that he is being reassigned to a position at the Defense Department, taking a key figure from the investigation out of the White House, according to two people familiar with the move who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel decisions.
Vindman had already informed senior officials at the NSC that he intended to take an early exit from his assignment and leave his post by the end of the month, according to people familiar with his decision, but Trump is eager to make a symbol of the Army officer soon after the Senate acquitted him of the impeachment charges approved by House Democrats.

Trump made clear on Thursday that he is ready to make his impeachment a key part of his reelection strategy and highlight his anger at Democratic leaders who led the charge to remove him from office, as well as Republicans who did not embrace the defense of his actions even though he was acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday.

Vindman being "reassigned" is the least of the things Trump plans to do.

At an event in the East Room of the White House, he called Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) a “horrible person” and derided Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a flip-flopping Republican with “no sign of principles” whose vote to convict Trump on abuse of power charges was born not out of principle but bitterness over his failed 2012 presidential bid.

And he kicked off the day at the National Prayer Breakfast by questioning the two lawmakers’ claims about the role religion plays in their public lives.

“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so,” he told a room full of religious leaders.

Trump and his allies are considering doing more than just launching verbal fusillades at his perceived enemies over impeachment as the decision regarding Vindman shows. Some of the president’s aides are discussing whether to remove or reassign several administration officials who testified during the impeachment inquiry, according to aides and advisers who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans. Meanwhile, Senate committee chairmen are ramping up their investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine while his father, Joe, was vice president.

“Lieutenant Colonel Col. Vindman and his twin brother — right? — we had some people that — really amazing,” Trump said during an event at the White House, mocking the national security counsel aide who testified during hearings investigating the White House’s actions toward Ukraine.

Expect much more of this in the coming weeks and months ahead.  Yes, Trump's targets have protection and resources for now, but then again, those only remain as long as Trump doesn't go for the jugular right away.  He;s already targeting Joe Biden with a nonsense "investigation".  You have to think that plenty of folks could be next.