The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared and Ivanka get to talk to Special Counsel Jack Smith for a bit as the federal criminal investigation(s) into Donald Trump continue.

 

The special counsel overseeing a criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump has issued subpoenas to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, according to a new report.

The subpoenas by special counsel Jack Smith, which demand the couple’s testimony before a grand jury, are related to his probe of Trump’s efforts to remain in the White House after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, The New York Times reported.

Both Ivanka Trump and Kushner served as senior White House advisors to the former president.

Both of them had testified to the select House committee that investigated the Capitol riot by a mob of Trump supporters whipped up into anger by the former president’s false claims of losing to Biden due to ballot fraud.

Smith previously issued a subpoena to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he will oppose the demand for his testimony.

And Smith reportedly subpoenaed Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows in the same probe.

The special counsel’s spokesmen declined to comment on the Times report. Attorneys for Ivanka Trump and Kushner did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

 

So we've got the gang back together here, Meadows, Pence, and now Jared and Ivanka.  Needless to say some six years plus since Trump crapped himself into an Oval Office chair, the fact we're still back at the subpoena stage (and all parties are fighting these still, particularly Pence) doesn't fill me with confidence.

Regardless, Merrick Garland has to get this right, or the country is lost. Period.

Jared, The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Donald Trump's son-in-law got $2 billion from the Saudis for his "investment firm" despite serious concerns about ever seeing a dime in profit from it, because the point was to pay off the Trump Crime family.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.

 

So a $2 billion bribe from Prince Hacksaw of the Desert. Here's the real question: would you trust Jared Kushner with $2 billion, given his long track record as a grifter, thief, slum landlord and con man?

No sane person would. Look, investing 10 million or so is a big risk. Investing $2 billion in anything is alarming. Investing $2 billion in a member of the Trump family is laughably illegal. And how do we know it's a payoff and not an investment? The real investment money went to Trump's money guy, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s firm said of its relationship with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, “Affinity, like many other top investment firms, is proud to have PIF and other leading organizations that have careful screening criteria, as investors.”

A spokesman for the Saudi fund declined to comment on its investment process. If any additional discussions about the deal took place, they were not reflected in the documents and correspondence obtained by The New York Times.

The Times reported last fall that Mr. Kushner had been seeking a Saudi investment. Now, the internal fund records and correspondence obtained by The Times show the outcome, scale and timing of his firm’s deal as well as the debate it aroused. Those documents and other filings indicate that at this point Mr. Kushner’s venture depends primarily on the Saudi money.

Mr. Kushner planned to raise up to $7 billion in all, according to a document prepared last summer for the Saudi fund’s board. But so far he appears to have signed up few other major investors.

 

Weird how Kushner can't get anything else other than the Saudi money in his firm. It's almost like other folks in Trump's orbit don't think it's a wise financial investment. After all, a firm the Saudis are willing to give $2,000,000,000 to ought to be a shoe-in for RoI, right?

I mean it's not like this is a huge, massive bribe right in front of our eyes that happened ten months ago, right? And surely these billions in overseas money would never end up in Trump's campaign coffers, going forward, yes?

Oh well. The documents that showed all this weren't on Hunter Biden's laptop, so nobody gives a good good god damn I guess.

Anatomy Of An Illness

America barely escaped COVID-19 being an order of magnitude worse as The Former Guy was so worried about the disease becoming his bete noir that he nearly scrapped the federal response entirely and left 100% of the work to dealing with infected Americans to the states. WaPo's new book on the early days of COVID-19 reveals Trump's response was just as horrible as I imagined.

“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Just five days earlier, Kushner had vowed to take charge of a national testing strategy with the help of the private sector, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Trump countered that the U.S. government never should have become involved in testing, arguing with his health secretary over why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking to track infections at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump reportedly said as he berated Azar.

Public health experts contend it was inadequate testing that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread largely undetected across the United States in early 2020, making contact tracing and isolation all but impossible in the early days of the outbreak and fueling the first staggering wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Trump’s rages frequently distracted senior officials and slowed the national response, the authors found, with the president touting his hunches and eventually turning to handpicked advisers including the radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no infectious-disease or public health experience. But the book also depicts the president as ineffectual and out of touch while his health and national security officials tried to manage the worsening outbreak.

Despite his famous reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump proved markedly ineffective at removing staffers during the pandemic, Abutaleb and Paletta write, boxed in by deputies who worried about political fallout and the implications of undermining public health.

For instance, Trump repeatedly told his aides in February to fire a senior State Department official who allowed 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return home. The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the number of official U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28.

But senior officials balked at firing the diplomat, and Trump and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney eventually “gave up,” Abutaleb and Paletta write, adding that the official’s decision to bring the sick Americans back to the United States may have saved their lives, given there were no later flights they could take.

Trump also would call for firing Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief who signed off on the Diamond Princess evacuation. Later, he would push to replace Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn when the agency chief refused to expedite vaccine approvals before the election and deferred to career FDA officials instead.

Both men would stay on for the duration of Trump’s presidency, along with Anthony S. Fauci — the longtime infectious-disease expert who became a top target of Trump and his allies but whose public popularity helped insulate him. Rather than fire Fauci, White House officials increasingly tuned out the advice from him and other top health officials, the book says, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.

Trump’s top deputies adopted a similar strategy of issuing threats or isolating their rivals, undermining efforts to manage the outbreak, Abutaleb and Paletta write.

Kadlec, who had overseen the purchase of 600 million masks, took the plan in late March to Kushner — who exploded in anger, throwing his pen against the wall in frustration when he learned the masks would not arrive until June.

“You f---ing moron,” Kushner reportedly said. “We’ll all be dead by June.”

Mark Meadows, whom Trump abruptly installed as White House chief of staff with little warning to Mulvaney, also berated Kadlec as the federal government struggled to distribute a new antiviral treatment called remdesivir, whose use the FDA had just authorized.

“I’m going to fire your a-- if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly yelled at Kadlec in a surprise phone call as the remdesivir rollout sputtered when scarce supplies were wrongly delivered to hospitals without eligible patients or appropriate refrigeration and the White House’s hopes for positive headlines slipped away.

“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you,” Abutaleb and Paletta write.

 

I know the term "kakistocracy" gets tossed around a lot when referring to the Trump regime, government by the least suitable individuals, and yet here we are with reams and mountains and terabytes of evidence affirming that for four years we trudged through that flaming manure pile and we barely made it out as a democratic nation.

And notice that all the major Trump villains were present: Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney. The worst possible chief executive hired the worst possible people to run the show.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner's family real estate firm just got rung up by a Maryland judge as being a slumlord, forcing thousands of tenants in their substandard apartment buildings to overpay for rent without the company providing basic repairs and utilities under state law.

It’s been six years since Dionne Mont first saw her apartment at Fontana Village, a rental housing complex just east of Baltimore. She was aghast that day to find the front door coming off its hinges, the kitchen cabinet doors stuck to their frames, mouse droppings under the kitchen sink, mold in the refrigerator, the toilet barely functioning and water stains on every upstairs ceiling, among other problems. But she had already signed the lease and paid the deposit.

Mont insisted that management make repairs, but that took several months, during which time she paid her $865 monthly rent and lived elsewhere. She was hit with constant late fees and so-called “court” fees, because the management company required tenants to pay rent at a Walmart or a check-cashing outlet, and she often couldn’t get there from her job as a bus driver before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff. She moved out in 2017.

Four years later, Mont has received belated vindication: On April 29, a Maryland judge ruled that the management company, which is owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, violated state consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to prior to signing a lease, and by assessing them all manner of dubious fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 of the company’s current and former tenants, including Mont, testified.

“I feel elated,” said Mont. “People were living in inhumane conditions — deplorable conditions.”

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh brought the consumer-protection case against Westminster Management, the property-management arm of Kushner Companies, in 2019 following a 2017 article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s treatment of its tenants at the 15 housing complexes it owned in the Baltimore area, which have served as profitable ballast for a company better known for its gleaming properties in New York. The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.

To build its case, the attorney general’s office subpoenaed records from the company and solicited testimony from current and former tenants, who provided it via remote video link to Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker late last year.

In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts — a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”

The manifold fees suggested a deliberate strategy to run up tenants’ tabs, Daneker wrote, repeatedly calling the practices “widespread and numerous.” She concluded that “these circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”

Daneker also found that the company violated consumer law by failing to have the proper debt-collection licenses for some of its properties and by misrepresenting the condition of units being leased to tenants. However, she found that the attorney general’s office did not establish that the company violated the law in several other areas, such as by misrepresenting its ability to provide maintenance on units or in some of its calculations of late fees.

Kushner Companies, which has since sold some of the complexes and put others of them on the market, declined to be interviewed for this article. A statement from Kushner general counsel Christopher Smith suggested that the ruling amounted to a victory for the company, despite the judge’s many findings against it. “Kushner respects the thoughtful depth of the Judge’s decision, which vindicates Westminster with respect to many of the Attorney General’s overreaching allegations,” Smith said.

In previous statements, the company had alleged that Frosh, a Democrat, had brought the suit for political reasons, and was singling out the company owned by the then-president’s son-in-law for a host of practices that the company said were common in the multi-housing rental industry. In her ruling, Daneker stated that she found no evidence of an “improper selective prosecution” in the suit.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment, noting that the case is not yet final. Each side will next have the chance to file exceptions, as objections are known, that will be considered by the final arbiter in the consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office. The state’s lawyers will also propose restitution sums for tenants and a civil penalty. Once the consumer protection arbiter issues a ruling, both sides will have the right to challenge it in the state’s appeals courts.

Also awaiting resolution is a separate class-action lawsuit brought by tenants that alleges, among other things, that the company’s late fees exceeded state limits. A Court of Special Appeals judge has yet to issue a ruling following a January oral argument on the plaintiffs’ appeal of previous rulings against both their attempt to certify themselves as a class and against the substance of their claim regarding late fees.

 

So there's still a huge legal fight ahead, but it's one Kushner Companies is bound to lose, and it's going to be costly for them. Frankly, by then I hope Jared Kushner is in prison along with his wife and orange father-in-law.

 

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner is a crafty bastard, and the Trump crime family continue to rob his cultists blind. Paul Waldman at WaPo:

If you thought you’d heard about all the financial chicanery Donald Trump and his family have engaged in during his presidency, rest assured there’s plenty more to be revealed. Here’s the latest story, courtesy of Business Insider:

President Donald Trump's most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent almost half of the campaign's $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider. 

The operation acted almost like a campaign within a campaign. It paid some of Trump's top advisors and family members, while shielding financial and operational details from public scrutiny. 

When Kushner and others created the company in April 2018, they picked Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to become its president, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence as its vice president, and Trump campaign Chief Financial Officer Sean Dollman as its treasurer and secretary, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations about the shell company.

To be clear, it could well be that no laws were violated, scrupulous about obeying the rules as the Trump and Kushner families are known to be. But the whole point of shell companies is to hide something; in this case, the campaign was able to show over $600 million in payments to the shell company, American Made Media Consultants Corp., on its Federal Election Committee filings, without the details that would be known if whatever they were spending money on was paid directly to vendors.

And while most of that $600 million probably went to buy advertising, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the favored officers of the shell company got nice salaries, nor if there were ways that it was used to funnel campaign contributions back to Trump himself.

We may never know. But I know this: Trump’s supporters couldn’t care less, even if it’s their money.

That’s because he has spent years convincing them that self-dealing and graft are perfectly fine. The only question is whether it’s the people you like who are benefiting.

This was always Trump’s argument about unethical behavior: not that he’s innocent and others are guilty, but that everyone is guilty, so we shouldn’t worry about his misdeeds. Everyone is corrupt, everyone is on the take, everyone mistreats women, we’re living in a world without morals or principles and all that matters is whether you win.

He never made any bones about it. Even in 2016, when Hillary Clinton charged that he was probably refusing to show his tax returns because he paid no taxes (which turned out to be pretty much true), he replied, “That makes me smart.” Obeying the rules is for suckers and chumps.

By now, Trump’s supporters — who will remain his supporters after he leaves office — firmly believe that. If he pulls a new scam and they’re his victims? That just shows what a genius he is.

 

If Trump takes our money, well, he deserves it.  If you get a dime, we reserve the right to inflict as much violence against you and yours as we can.

 

That's how Trump's America works.

 

We'll still be living in it long after he's out of the White House.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

The Trump Crime Family continues to openly discuss blanket pardons for Donald and his rotten kids, but the person who really needs a pardon or they're headed for a lifetime in prison is Jared Kushner.

Sweeping data released by the Small Business Administration on who benefited from pandemic relief programs raises questions about the equitability and distribution of loans intended for small businesses, an initial analysis by NBC News shows.

The analysis found that properties owned by the Trump Organization as well as the Kushner Companies, owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, profited from the program.

After months of litigation, the SBA released the dataset Tuesday night on every small business that received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) or Economic Injury Disaster (EIDL) loan.

The data reveals the most complete accounting to date of the more than $700 billion in forgivable loans Congress and the Trump administration introduced in the spring for allowable expenses, including payroll, rent, utilities and mortgage interest payments.

The analysis by NBC News, one of 11 newsrooms that sued for the release of data, also shows: 

• Over 25 PPP loans worth more than $3.65 million were given to businesses with addresses at Trump and Kushner real estate properties, paying rent to those owners. Fifteen of the properties self-reported that they only kept one job, zero jobs or did not report a number at all.
• The loans to Trump and Kushner properties included a $2,164,543 loan to the Triomphe Restaurant Corp., at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York City. The company reported the money didn’t go to keeping any jobs. It later closed.
• A company called LB City Inc, which is at Kushner’s Bungalow Hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, received a loan for $505,552.50 that it used to keep 155 jobs.
• Two tenants at 725 5th Avenue, Trump Tower, received more than $100,000 and kept only three jobs.
• Four tenants at the Kushner-owned 666 5th Avenue combined received more than $204,000, and retained only six jobs.

There were also some troubling signs of mismanagement revealed in the data. Over 100 loans were made to companies where no business name was listed, were listed as “no name available” or showed potential data entry errors, such as names that appeared to be dates or phone numbers. More than 300 companies appear to have each gotten more than $10 million in loans through their subsidiaries. Businesses were not supposed to receive more than $10 million per entity, except for those in the food, hospitality or hotels industries. 

 

Of course Trump and Kushner used the PPP as their own personal piggy bank, and ripped off American businesses to the tune of millions. They got millions in loans they didn't need, meanwhile, thousands of small businesses across America have now been permanently shuttered.

That's how it worked, and Republicans in Congress made sure of it.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia for any number of nefarious purposes in the wake of an Iranian nuclear scientist being assassinated last week.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.

The visits would focus on resolving a dispute between Qatar and a Saudi-led alliance, the Wall Street Journal reported, but a number of issues could be on the agenda.

Kushner and his team helped negotiate normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan since August. The official said they would like to advance more such agreements before Donald Trump hands power to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.

US officials believe enticing Saudi Arabia into a deal with Israel would prompt other Arab nations to follow suit. But the Saudis do not appear to be on the brink of reaching such a landmark deal and officials in recent weeks have been focusing on other countries, with concern about Iran’s regional influence a uniting factor.

Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran by unidentified assailants. Western and Israeli governments believe Fakhrizadeh was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Days before the killing, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Prince Mohammed, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

 

When I said earlier this month that there's any number of ways that the Trump regime could badly sabotage the incoming Biden administration during the lame duck period, this is exactly what I mean.  Jared's been Trump's bag man in the Middle East for years, and Netanyahu, still facing his own bribery and corruption trial scandal which keeps getting mysteriously delayed, is certainly not going to be a fan of Biden after the way he treated Obama for years.

Some sort of last-minute deal between MBS and Netanyahu that ties Biden's hands is exactly what I expect following this meeting, especially something that involves Iran.

Don't be surprised if Trump hands Biden a new Middle East war to deal with in his first 30 days.

 

Jared Kushner Goes Viral

Turns out Trump's scumbag son-in-law and his role on the COVID-19 taskforce are both examples of terrible failures, because if you thought for a second that these soul-sucking revenants gave a damn about America as this pandemic rages worse than ever into month nine, you've got disappointment coming. 

President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how the President had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, comments that came as more than 40,000 Americans already had died from the virus, which was ravaging New York City.

In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was "getting the country back from the doctors" in what he called a "negotiated settlement." Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the "panic phase" and "pain phase" of the pandemic and that the country was at the "beginning of the comeback phase."

"That doesn't mean there's not still a lot of pain and there won't be pain for a while, but that basically was, we've now put out rules to get back to work," Kushner said. "Trump's now back in charge. It's not the doctors."

The statement reflected a political strategy. Instead of following the health experts' advice, Trump and Kushner were focused on what would help the President on Election Day. By their calculations, Trump would be the "open-up president."

 CNN has obtained audio of two separate interviews with Kushner, which were conducted in April and May as part of Woodward's reporting for his book "Rage." In the wide-ranging conversations, Kushner described the President's relationship with his public health advisers in adversarial terms.

If this were a movie, Kushner would be the jackass adviser to the president who eventually gets killed by the alien virus and melts into goo and you'd cheer while it happened because he spent the entire movie being terrible and blackmailing the harried scientist/doctor protagonist.

As it is, 230,000 + Americans are dead and the pandemic is in its most infectious and potentially deadly third wave after ten months, and unless we evict these villains we'll be dealing with deadly surges of the virus every four months or so with a correspondingly exponentially higher death count until everyone can get vaccinated, and probably half of Americans will refuse the vaccine anyhow.

Seriously though, Kushner needs to cool his heels in prison for a while. The entire regime does, and the grim reality is even if Biden wins, they'll still have a good three months wo kill more Americans through inaction or actual interference with states taking measures. Don't be surprised if Trump orders the states that voted against him cut off from any government help in the months ahead.

And Kushner will cackle while it happens.

Kushner's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Trump's scummy son-in-law Jared Kushner is making the final pitch to Black voters ahead of Election Day, and like most rich bigot white guys who inherited millions from his family and married wealthy, he doesn't understand why lazy Black folk simply don't choose to be not poor anymore.

 

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said Black people must “want to be successful” in order for his father-in-law’s policies to help them.

“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Kushner said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”

Kushner’s remarks drew criticism on Twitter, where Democrats said he was implying that many Black people don’t want to be successful.

Trump’s campaign believes he’s drawing more Black support for his re-election than in his 2016 run, thanks to policies including a law he signed reducing prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, increased spending for historically Black colleges and universities and new tax benefits for investors in low-income communities.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany issued a statement saying “internet trolls” had taken Kushner’s remarks out of context.

“From criminal justice reform and record HBCU funding to record low Black unemployment and record high income increases, there is simply no disputing that President Trump accomplished what Democrats merely talked about,” McEnany said.

Trump lost among Black voters by about 82 percentage points in 2016 but has closed the gap in support to about 71 points this year, according to an analysis of polling data FiveThirtyEight.com published last week. He’s improved particularly with Black men, cutting his disadvantage from 72 to 57 percentage points.

 

Unfortunately, as the article indicates, there's evidence Trump could get 12-15% of the Black vote this time around instead of 8%.  That alone would be enough to give Trump the electoral college victory by assuring Trump wins in NC, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan. The same goes for Trump doing better than he did in 2016 with Latinx voters as well.

 

Fortunately for Biden, he's doing much better than Clinton did in 2016 with white college-educated voters, seniors, and women overall. And there's plenty of evidence Biden has cut into the huge margins Trump had with white non-college voters too. That will more than make up for Trump's gains with Black and brown voters.

The point remains though that Trump regime's years of bashing Democrats and telling Black voters that the Democrats have done nothing for you (which Trump and Mitch McConnell have all but made sure is the case) is working to some extent.

Even though, as Jared Kushner demonstrates, they hold us in contempt, well beneath them.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Senate Intelligence Committee released their fifth and final counter-intelligence volume of their bipartisan report on Donald Trump's Russian collusion and finds that not only was the Mueller report right, but that it didn't go nearly far enough to describe the damning actions by Trump and his campaign.

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.
The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Like the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Putin ordered the DNC hacking, and ordered an operation to help Donald Trump win. At the very least, Paul Manafort passed and received information from Russian intelligence, the report finds.

Democrats highlighted those ties in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

Democrats also laid out a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.

The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

And yes, that now infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Trump's campaign and Russian nationals was every bit as shady as we suspected.

The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”

Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.

The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.

The Senate Intel report concludes that the Russians were behind the DNC email theft, that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were given that information, and that Roger Stone told WikiLeaks to release the DNC information to blow the Access Hollywood tapes out of the news cycle, which it did in the space of hours.

Oh, but it gets worse once we get to the appendices of the document. Specifically, Appendix A notes that were a number of criminal referrals made to the Justice Department of Trump campaign officials that were of course ignored by Jeff Sessions and later Bill Barr.  We now know who these referrals indicate.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have misled the committee during their testimony, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official confirmed reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, which reported on the matter last week. A criminal referral to the Justice Department means Congress believes a matter warrants investigation for potential violation of the law.

The committee detailed its concerns in a letter to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, the official said.

The Post reported that the letter was divided into two sections. One named those suspected of making false statements, The Post said: Bannon; Clovis, a co-chair of the Trump campaign in 2016; and Prince, a private security contractor.

A second section raised concerns about the testimony of other witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Kushner, whose statements were contradicted by Trump campaign aide Richard Gates, although it did not pointedly make a false-statements allegation, The Post reported.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the committee questioned whether Bannon lied about his interactions and conversations with Prince about a meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and a top Russian official. Prince told special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors that he briefed Bannon on the January 2017 meeting, but Bannon said the conversation never happened. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump's son and son-in-law, a former Trump adviser, and a former Trump campaign co-chair, and the brother of the Education Secretary. They were not prosecuted by the Justice Department, nor were they even investigated as a result.

It's obstruction of justice, all the way down.

The nearly 1000-page report confirms what I've been saying for years:

Trump took Russian help to win in 2016 and then lied about it at every opportunity to the American people.

Ahem.

This is the report that Robert Mueller should have released last year. This is the report that should have gotten Trump impeached. Several people in the campaign should be in prison, including Trump's own son and son-in-law.

And this is the report that should cost the GOP everything in 2020 at the polls.

Sunday Long Read: Jared Went Viral

If you're wondering whatever happened to Jared Kushner's super top secret national testing strategy, it was delivered stillborn at the White House, according to Vanity Fair's Catherine Eban. The bottom line is that the Trump regime believed from the start that COVID-19 would be relegated purely to blue states: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon and Washington state, and nobody pushed that vile lie harder than Trump himself.

Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article. 

Kushner’s brain trust included Adam Boehler, his summer college roommate who now serves as chief executive officer of the newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government development bank that makes loans overseas. Other group members included Nat Turner, the cofounder and CEO of Flatiron Health, which works to improve cancer treatment and research. 

A Morgan Stanley banker with no notable health care experience, Jason Yeung took a leave of absence to join the task force. Along the way, the group reached out for advice to billionaires, such as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen. 

The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace. 

According to one participant, the group did not coordinate its work with a diagnostic-testing team at Health and Human Services, working under Admiral Brett Giroir, who was appointed as the nation’s “testing czar” on March 12. Kushner’s group was “in their own bubble,” said the participant. “Other agencies were in their own bubbles. The circles never overlapped.” 

As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”

Kushner’s team hammered out a detailed plan, which Vanity Fair obtained. It stated, “Current challenges that need to be resolved include uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the US, both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”

The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments. 

And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.” 

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away. 

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force. 

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. 

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

They thought it would kill blue state voters and turn them against Biden and the governors like Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo, so Trump let the virus kill people, and that by June it would be all over and he would look like a hero for protecting "the rest of America". They though tens of thousands of dead New Yorkers and Californians would help them win, so they let people get sick and die.

And then it got into red states like Texas, Georgia, Florida and Arizona, which anyone with an eighth of a brain could have told you was going to happen.

Now the entire country is suffering.  It's uncontrolled. 150,000 are dead and thousands more will die every day. 200,000 dead by Labor Day isn't out of the question.

Donald Trump is a monster.  We have to remove him from power.

Black Lives Still Matter

ZVTS readers were right, as you usually are.

Now we know why last week's GOP Sen. Tim Scott "police reform" bill was such a screamingly obvious trap to try to turn white voters against Black Lives Matter and the Democrats, and Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris in particular. Something that terrible needed a Trojan Horse introduction, and it got one through former Obama adviser turned CNN "race expert" Van Jones.

Jones went on CNN’s Inside Politics with John King and Anderson Cooper 360 to enthusiastically commend Trump’s executive order—even as it was being criticized as cynical and unproductive by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, an influential racial justice organization that Jones himself co-founded in 2005.  

CNN viewers weren’t informed that he had actually attended secret White House meetings with his new friend Jared Kushner, discussing ways to frame the presidential project. 

According to a knowledgeable White House source, who expressed satisfaction that there were zero leaks, Jones and California human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, who runs #cut50, a prison-reform group that Jones also founded, actively participated with law enforcement officials and White House staffers to help fashion the order and guide the politics of the discussion to what they considered “the sweet spot” between law enforcement and “the reasonable middle” and “the reasonable left.” 

Skyping from his Los Angeles home, with a biography of Nelson Mandela and a Black Panther graphic novel visible on the bookshelf behind him, Jones told viewers of CNN’s noon show Inside Politics: “The executive order is a good thing, mainly because you saw the support of law enforcement there... There is movement in the direction of a database for bad cops. We have never had a federal database for bad cops, that’s why all these cops go all over the place doing bad stuff… The chokeholds, that’s common ground now between Nancy Pelosi and Trump. Good stuff there.” 

Hours later, Jones doubled down on Anderson Cooper 360—again without disclosing his role advising the Trump White House. “What do you make of this executive order?” Cooper asked him. 

“I think it’s pushing in the right direction,” Jones told the CNN anchor. “What you got today is, I think, a sign that we are winning,” he added. “Donald Trump has put himself on record saying we need to reform the police department… We are winning! Donald Trump had no plan a month ago to work on this issue at all. The fact that we are now in the direction of moving forward, I think, is good.” 

During a Rose Garden ceremony that was actually a Trump campaign event—at which the president defended the police, touted his commitment to “law and order,” boasted about the stock market and the pre-coronavirus economy, and attacked Joe Biden—Trump was flanked by uniformed officers and police union officials as he signed the executive order in response to the pandemic of unjustified killings of unarmed Black Americans by white cops. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was quick to call the event “a photo op” and the executive order “seriously short of what is required”; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer panned it as “weak tea” and the Rev. Al Sharpton—a longtime ally of Jones going back to the 1990s, when Jones was a self-avowed “radical” and social justice activist in Oakland—derided it as “toothless and meaningless” because it gives lip service, but no legal mandate, to banning chokeholds (unless officers decide their lives are at risk), improving police training, making use of mental health professionals, and keeping a national registry of bad cops. 

“I did not think the executive order was worth the paper it was written on,” Sharpton told The Daily Beast. “Van’s experiment with Trump is a case of him having more faith than I have, but I’m not going to attack him for doing it…I think he’s well-intentioned, but I think he totally underestimates the kind of guy he’s dealing with. I just disagree that the people he’s dealing with have a sincere bone in their body. But I can’t fault him for trying.”

Man, the best part of the article is Al Sharpton coming in with "Well at least he tried" church senior pastor to the junior pastor who went out on his own and got his wings clipped by city council shade I've seen in some time.

I understand that the perfect cannot become the enemy of the good, believe me.  But Van Jones and Trump's toothless executive order weren't good at all.  It was designed to e a palatable trap, and Van Jones helped them do it.

That pisses me off something fierce.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein takes to CNN for long read piece on Donald Trump's phone calls to foreign leaders, and how they are so awful, how Trump is such a belligerent numbskull, that even his most basic interactions with our allies and our enemies are nearly all perfect examples of major national security breaches by and of themselves.

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest. 

These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties. 

By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources. 

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders. 

The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep. 

Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with the national interest. 

To protect the anonymity of those describing the calls for this report, CNN will not reveal their job titles nor quote them at length directly. More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in real time or were provided detailed summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources said. The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period extending into June. 

The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions with some foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment. 

The White House had not responded to a request for comment as of Monday afternoon. 

One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

The piece is long, with Bernstein's usual attention to detail, a story researched over several months with multiple named and anonymous sources within the Trump regime itself confirming the facts. It is also a crushing indictment of the Trump regime, and in particular, of Trump himself.

The people who come out looking the worst here are once again the people who enabled Trump time and time again, who knew of this behavior and not only did nothing to stop it, they encouraged it in order to keep him happy, placating a man so unstable and fragile that he remains incapable of anything that isn't of a transactional nature that directly benefits him and his ego.

Pathetic, the whole lot.

They need to go to jail.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion, Con't

Time magazine interviewed Trump Regime VP of Fraud, Jared Kushner, about COVID-19 and the election, and while Kushner is still a deeply sociopathic automaton with no capability of empathy other than to fake it, it's his response on the November election that should have all of us in the streets with pitchforks and tumbrels.

While much of the country remains locked down, Congress has passed a series of stimulus measures and sent checks to millions of Americans to help stabilize the economy as it suffers the worst unemployment levels since the Great Depression. Critics have noted that certain provisions in the CARES Act, like the joint tax break in Section 2304, will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.

When asked if he personally stands to benefit from the bill, Kushner said he doesn’t know how it will affect him, because he doesn’t manage his personal finances and has recused himself from his businesses. “I have no knowledge of any of this that was designed to help me personally, or the President,” Kushner said. (Kushner also denied that the volunteer force he organized to work on procuring medical supplies kept a “V.I.P.” spreadsheet to prioritize tips from political allies, as the New York Times had reported.)

Americans’ economic distress could hurt Trump’s re-election prospects. Kushner himself had previously told TIME that Trump’s pitch to voters this fall was going to focus on a booming economy. Now, Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in both national and swing-state polls. Kushner said Trump is “looking forward” to debating Biden and dismissed the polls as “inaccurate.” Kushner said he believes the choice in the election will come down to: “Who do you trust to build the economy back?”

When asked if there was a chance the presidential election could be postponed past November 3 due to the pandemic, Kushner said that isn’t his decision. “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” he said.

“Hopefully by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again,” Kushner continued. “I really believe that once America opens up, it’ll be very hard for America to ever lock down again.”

Wait, what?

He's not sure if he can commit to free and fair elections in November?

Nobody in their right mind would say this unless there's a plan to not commit to having an election.

I mean, states decide this, we've been over this, but what?  It's not up to Kushner or even Trump at all here, but this is something you say if you've been giving an awful lot of thought about not having an election.

Getting Their Marching Orders

The GOP is on the move getting out talking points to state-level Republicans to convince voters to go back to the charnel house and work themselves to death in the name of The American Economy. Louisiana is of particular note:

An internal memorandum from Mandeville-based GOP political operative Jay Connaughton, addressed to Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt of Slidell, and privately circulated among GOP state legislators outlines a series of talking points to use in a coordinated campaign aimed at politicizing and undermining the emergency orders issued by Gov. John Bel Edwards in curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Edwards’ orders are in conformance with the guidelines issued by the White House and follow the recommendations of public health experts and medical professionals. The Bayou Brief obtained a copy of the document earlier this evening.

Among other things, the memo advises legislators to avoid “trap words” like “death/die,” “politics/political,” “models,” and “hoax.” The very first “trap word” on the list: “Republican.”

It cautions lawmakers to anticipate questions about whether or not “reopening too early (will) cause the virus to rebound” and whether a “virus respects parish borders.” Taken in its totality, the document reads like a guide to subverting public health policy and reframing the efforts to curb the pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Louisianians, as an “economic shutdown.”
Covid-19 has now killed more people in Louisiana than those who perished as a consequence of the Federal Flood after Hurricane Katrina. More than one out of every 1,000 residents of New Orleans have died from the virus, which had been disproportionately affected when the novel Coronavirus was first reported in the state. Since then, the pandemic has spread to all 64 parishes.

Gov. Edwards announced Monday the extension of the state’s emergency “stay at home orders” until May 15th. “While this is not the announcement I want to make, I am hopeful, and all of Louisiana should be hopeful, that we will enter into the next phase of reopening soon, in mid-May,” he said. ”I am anxious to get all areas of our economy reopened, but if we accelerate too quickly, we may have to slam on the brakes. That will be bad for public health and for businesses, bad for our people and bad for our state.”

The GOP memorandum contains a series of factual distortions about the state’s response and falsely claims that Gov. Edwards’s order was made against the advice of the Trump White House. The White House actually recommended Edwards take the exact approach that he’s now implementing, telling governors to ensure their states have satisfied a set of criteria before ordering a “phased reopening.”

Again, the whole point is massive gaslighting on the part of the Trump regime, to sell the utter failure of the federal response to the virus, with deaths now topping 60,000 and growing, as a "success".

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner on Wednesday expressed optimism that much of the country could be "back to normal" by June as several states prepare to lift restrictions meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

"I think what you’ll see in May as the states are reopening now is May will be a transition month, you’ll see a lot of states starting to phase in the different reopening based on the safety guidelines that President Trump outlined on April 19," Kushner said on "Fox & Friends."

"I think you’ll see by June that a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again," the president's son-in-law continued.

The ambitious timeline could be politically risky given that cases in the U.S. are still climbing and health experts have cautioned that parts of the country will have to alternate between imposing strict social distancing measures and easing them back until there's a vaccine in order to avoid new outbreaks.

"Back to normal by June" is not only a sick fantasy, it's a dangerous one.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

At every turn we discover new evidence that the Trump White House was briefed on the dangers of a novel coronavirus pandemic originating in China, and that the warnings came months in advance while the regime did nothing to protect the American people.  Today, it's the fact that US military intelligence picked up on COVID-19 around Thanksgiving.

As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia -- forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.

"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

"The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing," the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. "But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on."

So the Trump regime had more than three months to do something, not two, and they downplayed it, lied, and did nothing instead.

And now 2,000 Americans a day are dying from the virus.  Many, many more deaths are coming.

House Democrats are finally starting to ask questions about the federal response and the role Trump's family is playing in it.

Two Democratic House committee leaders are demanding answers from the Trump administration about Jared Kushner's role in directing and redirecting the flow of life-saving medical equipment among private companies, various levels of government and hospitals in need.

The demand came in a letter sent Tuesday, the day the Kushner-backed supply chain task force abandoned its "war room" at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's headquarters following the revelation that a "partner" of the agency who worked in the area had tested positive for coronavirus. The letter was sent by Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., to FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor, giving an April 15 due date to provide files related to the efforts of Kushner, the president's senior adviser and son-in-law.

The White House has routinely ignored requests from Congress for information, and Trump was impeached by the House last year in part for directing aides to block House investigators from obtaining testimony and documents from the administration. He was acquitted by the Senate in February.

NBC News' requests for comment from FEMA, the White House and Kushner's team on the lawmakers' letter went unanswered.

Thompson, chair of the Homeland Security Committee, and Maloney, chair of the Oversight and Government Committee, are seeking "all communications between any FEMA employee and Jared Kushner regarding the acquisition, distribution of, or federally directed sale of any form of PPE or of medical supplies and equipment to be used for the diagnosis or treatment of COVID-19," according to the letter.

Of course the Trump regime will ignore it.  Trump will go back to screaming about "Witch hunts!" and it'll work just like it did three months ago.

Kushner Goes Viral

The President's useless son-in-law Jared Kushner is now in charge of the federal government's "response" to COVID-19. I wish I was joking, that this was Saturday Night Live or an episode of Arrested Development, but sadly, this is our reality in 2020. Michelle Goldberg at the NY Times:

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.

The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.

Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

Jared Kushner is the obsequious little troll that gets in-between the boss and the guys in the trenches, demanding that the little people give him "better metrics" before any additional help is coming.  He is cutting the public health experts out of the equation fully, and his "cost benefit analysis" means millions will be slaughtered in a corporate genocide the likes of which demands this man sitting in chains on national television, facing a furious nation.

JARED KUSHNER: "The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states stockpiles that they then use." pic.twitter.com/9Q7j8QBCMv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 2, 2020

The experts are gone.  Fauci, Brix, they are now the sideshow.  Failson-in-law Number One is runing the show.  He'll find efficiencies.  Efficiencies like "It's not supposed to be the states' stockpiles that they then use."

You people are costing us more than it's worth to keep you alive.

Therefore we have to let a certain percentage of you go.  Good luck in your future endeavors.

Nuremberg trials are too good for these jackals.

The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

Hundreds of billions for banks and real estate to socialize market losses in the COVID-19 package, no problem. $1.2 billion for hospital ventilators? We will resist your anti-capitalist dogma, hippie!

The White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.

The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.
Government officials said that the deal might still happen but that they are examining at least a dozen other proposals. And they contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt. Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce.

By early Thursday evening, at the coronavirus task force’s regular news briefing, where the president often appears, there was still nothing to disclose, and the outcome of the deliberations remained unclear.

But a General Motors spokesman said that “Project V,” as the ventilator program is known, was moving very fast, and a company official said “there’s no issue with retooling.”

A Ventec representative agreed.

“Ventec and G.M. have been working at breakneck speed to leverage our collective expertise in ventilation and manufacturing to meet the needs of the country as quickly as possible and arm medical professionals with the number of ventilators needed to save lives,” said Chris O. Brooks, Ventec’s chief strategy officer.

The only thing missing was clarity from the government about how many ventilators they needed — and who would be paid to build them.

The shortage of ventilators has emerged as one of the major criticisms of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. The need to quickly equip hospitals across the country with tens of thousands more of the devices to treat those most seriously ill with the virus was not anticipated despite the Trump administration’s own projection in a simulation last year that millions of people could be hospitalized. And even now, the effort to produce them has been confused and disorganized.

At the center of the discussion about how to ramp up the production of ventilators is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House aide, who has told people that he was called in two weeks ago by Vice President Mike Pence to produce more coronavirus test kits and who has now turned his attention to ventilators.

He has been directing officials at FEMA in the effort. Two officials said the suggestion to wait on the General Motors offer came from Col. Patrick Work, who is working at FEMA. Some government officials expressed concern about the possibility of ordering too many ventilators, leaving them with an expensive surplus.

As the agency has sorted through offers, trying to weigh production ability and costs, hospitals in New York and elsewhere are reporting a desperate need for more ventilators, which are critical in treating respiratory problems in a fast-rising tide of severe coronavirus cases.

A spokeswoman for FEMA said Colonel Work presented information on each contract in such meetings but did not make any recommendations. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

New York? You don't get ventilators.

You were mean to Dear Leader and sued him.

Now there's a price to pay and America's governors have to worry that trying to save their citizens will in fact get them killed when Trump cuts them off and cuts the throat of thousands.

Republicans and Democrats alike are testing whether to fight or flatter, whether to back channel requests or go public, all in an attempt to get Trump’s attention and his assurances.

At stake may be access to masks, ventilators and other personal protective gear critically needed by health care workers, as well as field hospitals and federal cash. As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., put it, “I can’t afford to have a fight with the White House.”
Underlying this political dance is Trump’s tendency to talk about the government as though it’s his own private business. The former real estate mogul often discusses government business like a transaction dependent on relationships or personal advantage, rather than a national obligation.

“We are doing very well with, I think, almost all of the governors, for the most part,” he said during a town hall on Fox News on Tuesday. “But you know, it’s a two-way street. They have to treat us well.”
On a private conference call Thursday with Trump, governors from both parties pressed the president for help — some more forcefully than others.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, urged Trump to use his full authority to ramp up production of necessary medical equipment, according to an audio recording of the call obtained by AP. But Trump said the federal government is merely the “backup.”

“I don’t want you to be the backup quarterback, we need you to be Tom Brady here,” Inslee replied, invoking the football star and Trump friend.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, meanwhile, was lavish in his praise.

“We’re just so appreciative, but we really need you,” Justice told Trump.

In an interview Thursday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Trump groused, “Some of these governors take, take, take and then they complain.”

Of Whitmer, he said, “All she does is sit there and blame the federal government.” And he said Inslee “should be doing more,” adding, “He’s always complaining.”

And at the bottom of Trump's list?  Cuomo and New York.

In a call to the White House, Cuomo delivered the same grateful message privately, according to two officials with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly talk about the private discussions.

Trump later expressed happiness to aides and advisers that Cuomo had said such nice things about him, according to two White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing.

A week later, when Cuomo delivered an urgent, frustrated plea for ventilators Tuesday, he didn’t mention Trump by name. Shortly after, a White House official said 4,000 more ventilators would be shipped to New York.

But later that day, Trump vented to aides, complaining that Cuomo made it seem like Washington had abandoned him, according to those White House officials and Republicans.

His anger broke through during the town hall. When Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the coronavirus response, was describing testing problems and mentioned New York’s high transmission rate, Trump interjected, trying to push Birx to criticize Cuomo: “Do you blame the governor for that?”

Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve.