Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Against all odds, a Chicago police officer has been convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer in half a century to be found guilty of murder for an on-duty shooting. He faces a minimum of 6 years in prison when he’s sentenced by Judge Vincent Gaughan.

The jury deliberated for about 7 ½ hours before finding Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder instead of the first-degree charges for which he was indicted.

The veteran officer was also convicted of all 16 counts of aggravated battery for each shot he fired at McDonald. The jury, however, acquitted him of a single count of official misconduct.
The verdict comes after a landmark trial that featured testimony over 10 days by 44 witnesses, 24 called by the prosecution and 20 by the defense.

The three-week trial flipped the script of most murder cases at the Leighton Criminal Court Building with prosecutors questioning the credibility of police officers who typically serve as their most trusted witnesses.

Van Dyke himself broke from normal protocol for police officers facing charges of wrongdoing, opting to have a jury decide his fate instead of asking the judge to weigh the evidence in a bench trial. His decision to testify in his own defense was also rare for a building where most criminal defendants — especially those charged with murder — invoke their right to remain silent.

The charges against Van Dyke centered on the dashcam video depicting the moments leading up to the shooting on Oct. 20, 2014 — footage that has been played around the world for nearly three years. The graphic images sparked protests and political upheaval and led to a sprawling federal civil rights probe into the systemic mistreatment of citizens by Chicago police, particularly in the city's minority communities.

It's a start.  Nothing will truly qualify as justice here, but it's a start.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The procedural vote this morning for Brett Kavanaugh will be in about a half-hour from this post, so by lunchtime we ought to know where things are going.  The one thing I do know is as of this morning, Mitch still doesn't have the votes.  Three Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin are still in play.  Mitch needs two of the four.

Murkowski: Murkowski was scheduled to go back in to review the FBI report late Thursday evening. While she wasn't spotted by CNN, two senators she is friendly with were -- Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and John Hoeven of North Dakota. Murkowski reviewed the report multiple times on Thursday and largely avoided reporters. 

Collins: Collins gave GOP leaders an early boost when she said the FBI report appears to be "very thorough." But she declined to weigh in on the nomination itself through the day, and went back to review materials multiple times. She completed her review of the materials Thursday night. In past votes of this magnitude, she will put out a lengthy statement and give a floor speech laying out her decision before the vote. 

Flake: Flake gave another boost to GOP leaders saying he didn't hear "additional corroboration" of the Kavanaugh allegations in the first staff briefing. But he too largely went silent and avoided reporters the rest of the day. Sources with knowledge of how he approached the day tell me he is not as skittish as some were reporting about his final decision. But he did want to make sure he went thoroughly through the report he was essentially responsible for existing. 

Manchin: "Heidi made her decision. I'll make mine." That's what Manchin said when asked about the decision by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, another red state Democrat who voted for Justice Neil Gorsuch, to oppose Kavanaugh. The cross-current pressures are intense between his party, his state, and the nominee himself. He will review the material again this morning before making a final decision, he told reporters.

My gut says we will not be saved by these Republicans.  Even if Manchin votes no, if the others vote yes it's meaningless.  I in fact suspect all four will vote for cloture this morning to proceed with Kavanaugh's confirmation after a "lengthy and difficult process" or whatever.

The same votes will be made to confirm on Saturday afternoon, and then that's it. 52-48 to confirm.

The consequences to America will be dire.  Our only hope after that is to vote out Republicans across the board starting in November.

StupidiNews!

• A 22-pound rock that a Michigan man was using as a doorstop turned out to be a meteorite worth $100,000, confirmed by both Central Michigan University and the Smithsonian.
• The 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has gone to team of American and British scientists for molecular evolution, speeding up the process in generations of organisms.
• The Trump regime is expected to win concessions from the World Trade Organization to shut down the WTO's appeals court by blocking all appointments to the panel.
• Trump regime Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh gets a procedural vote in the Senate today that will determine if he has the votes to proceed to a full Senate confirmation.
• A horror film based on a Twitter thread by authors Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes premieres this weekend on Syfy, You Might Be The Killer riffs on summer camp slashers in the digital age.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

Martin "BooMan" Longman argues that confirming Kavanaugh after all this, the accusations, the wrenching testimony, the sham FBI investigation and all of it, will rend the country.  He's not wrong.

To be sure, there would be costs on the other side if he were to be denied confirmation, and I don’t dispute that this has been one of the nastiest and no holds barred spectacles in the history of the country. But another Justice would eventually take this place on the Court and the wounds would slowly heal over time. That’s not going to happen with Kavanaugh sitting on the bench after he promised payback to the Clinton conspiracists he falsely claims have been behind the allegations against him.

I suppose it’s possible that Kavanaugh may one day be impeached, but that would be a rending national debacle all on its own, and absent that remedy this is a sore that is going to weep without end. It’s a mistake to confirm this man because his rulings will not be accepted and his mere presence will destroy the credibility of the Court.

The Republicans are thinking very short term right now, looking at a temporary uptick in the Senate race polls and thinking they’re on the right track. But I can tell, just by observing the women in my life, that this has set off a determined revolt and activated formerly apathetic people into a lifetime of activism and an absolutely unshakable thirst for payback.

Sen. Grassley says we’re at “rock bottom” and he wants “a future of mending things,” but if he actually interacted with the people he’s bullying he’d find out that he hasn’t seen rock bottom and their idea of mending things will not be to his liking.

Trump's election was a storm.  Kvanaugh's confirmation is a hurricane.  I know that history tells us that for all the anger and rage on our side, our side will not choose to vote.  We failed in 2010, we failed in 2014.  The other side has waited for this moment, where they cut out throats and leave liberalism to bleed out one Kavanaugh decision at a time, for decades.  Nothing will stop them.  Nothing can stop them.

Nothing can stop them, except us voting in numbers too big for them to ignore.  Because the next stage past that, history tells us, is where the metaphorical war becomes very, very real.

Hack The Planet, China Edition

Bloomberg Businessweek blows the lid off a massive Chinese intel operation to attach microchips to the data centers of basically every major US company (and more than a few government agencies) giving them 100% complete access to every network that machine can get to.

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says. 

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.

This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment. One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning. 

One country in particular has an advantage executing this kind of attack: China, which by some estimates makes 75 percent of the world’s mobile phones and 90 percent of its PCs. Still, to actually accomplish a seeding attack would mean developing a deep understanding of a product’s design, manipulating components at the factory, and ensuring that the doctored devices made it through the global logistics chain to the desired location—a feat akin to throwing a stick in the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai and ensuring that it washes ashore in Seattle. “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow,” says Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and the founder of Grand Idea Studio Inc. “Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.” 

But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies. 

One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.

So, yeah.  Massive, massive data breach on the nation-state level, for years, with China having complete access to American corporate networks as well as government ones.

But remember, we don't need to be worried about cybersecurity, according to the Trump regime.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Five weeks out and while Republicans are expecting white anger over the Kavanaugh confirmation to save, if not increase their Senate majority, the House is looking more and more like a bloodbath for the GOP as the latest Cook Political Report House chart finds multiple GOP toss-up races moving into the Democratic column.

Five weeks out, several personally popular Republicans who appeared to be defying the "blue wave" in Clinton-won districts are beginning to see their leads erode. GOP Reps. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), John Katko (NY-24) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01) led most surveys over the summer but are now prime targets as their well-funded Democratic challengers become better-known and the Kavanaugh debate further polarizes voters into red and blue corners. 

It's becoming harder and harder to see Republicans' path to holding the majority. In the past few days, multiple Democrats challengers have announced staggering fundraising totals of more than $3 million during the third quarter of the year, exceeding what many predecessors have raised for an entire cycle. One high-ranking Republican worries his party could be "buried under an avalanche" of Democratic money that GOP outside groups can't match. 

After today's ratings changes, there are 15 GOP-held seats in Lean or Likely Democratic (including seven incumbents) and Democrats would only need to win 11 of the 31 races in the Toss Up column to flip the majority. There's still time for political conditions to change, but today the likeliest outcome appears to be a Democratic gain of between 25 and 40 seats (they need 23 for House control).

And you'll never guess who appears to be in real trouble but our old friend, Ron Paul Junior (Junior) himself, Michigan's favorite Glibertarian con man, Justin Amash.

West central: Grand Rapids, Battle Creek
Likely Republican. Amash, a Freedom Caucus member and heir to Ron Paul's libertarian mantle in the House, has been presumed to be safe thanks to his vocal criticism of President Trump (Amash cited Trump's "dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity" at one point in June). But Democrat Gretchen Whitmer appears to be running away with the governor's race and is giving several Michigan Republicans down-ballot jitters. 

This increasingly professional Grand Rapids seat is a Democratic recruitment failure: Cathy Albro, a pro-single-payer former teacher who won the August primary with 68 percent, had raised just $61,000 at the end of July. However, Amash had just $277,000 on hand and doesn't appear to be running a vigorous campaign either. There's also no guarantee his Trump criticism will earn him as many votes from Democrats as he loses from Trump supporters. 

Despite the parties' utter lack of activity here, the potential for a horrible night for Michigan Republicans makes overlooked districts like this one watching. Trump only won this seat 52 percent to 42 percent, in line with plenty of other districts that are competitive.

See if we can't help out Cathy Albro, eh?

In addition to Amash, Mia Love is in trouble in Utah again, and so is Keith Yoder in KC.  These are seats that could very well fall if the national mood is as bad as it seems to be for the GOP.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• One sheriff's deputy is dead and seven other people were wounded in a shootout in Florence, SC yesterday when deputies tried to serve a warrant, the suspect is in custody.
• The US Ambassador to Estonia, James Melville, has stepped down because of Donald Trump's "America First" policy, the three-decade diplomatic veteran says he can no longer do his job.
• The Trump White House has received the FBI report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kvanaugh's alleged sexual assaults and is "fully confident" the Senate will confirm him.
• The Pentagon is drafting plans for a global show of US military force to deter Chinese aggression as the Trump regime prepares accusations against Beijing of election interference in 2018.
• Multiple broadband lobbyist groups are suing California over the state's new net neutrality law, the joint lawsuit contends California has no authority to regulate broadband at all under federal law.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The FBI investigation of the sexual assault claims against Trump regime Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a gigantic scam, and everyone at this point knows it.

The FBI hasn’t interviewed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford because it doesn’t have clear authority from the White House to do so, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Instead, the White House has indicated to the FBI that testimony from Kavanaugh and Ford, who has accused him of attempting to rape her when they were in high school, before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week is sufficient, said the people, who asked to not be identified discussing the sensitive matter.

The new evidence of constraints on the FBI probe came as Republican Senator Bob Corker told reporters the FBI is likely to give senators a stack of interview reports, probably later on Wednesday. He said senators were told in a GOP meeting that a vote on cutting off debate is likely on Friday to move toward a confirmation vote on Kavanaugh. 

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to force the issue and seek explicit approval from the White House to interview Ford and Kavanaugh. And it wasn’t clear why the FBI hasn’t yet talked to other people who have been recommended by lawyers or who have voluntarily come forward -- or if the bureau would need explicit approval to talk with them as well.

Confusion has now beset the investigation, fed by conflicting signals over what constraints have been placed on the bureau despite President Donald Trump’s comment Monday that “the FBI should interview anybody that they want, within reason.” 

The FBI declined to comment on the investigation or its timing.

The cloture vote is happening Friday regardless of the investigation, and it will have 50 votes.  Mitch still doesn't have enough for the final vote however, and that's the only known thing.   Why risk it?  Why the dog and pony show?  Why draw it out?

Republicans want as much outrage as possible to close the gender gap, and they are counting on white women to once again side with Trump as they did in 2016.

When many conservative women around the country watched Christine Blasey Ford appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, they didn’t find her testimony compelling or convincing, as many liberals did.

They saw a political farce. 

“Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so angry in all of my adult life,” says Ginger Howard, a Republican national committeewoman from Georgia. “It brings me to the point of tears, it makes me so angry.”

In interviews with roughly a dozen female conservative leaders from as many states, this was the overwhelming sentiment: These women are infuriated with the way the sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been handled. They are not convinced by Ford or any other woman who has come forward. They resent the implication that all women should support the accusers. And they believe that this scandal will ultimately hurt the cause of women who have been sexually assaulted. 

Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. 

Nearly all the women I spoke with are plugged into state- and local-level conservative politics. Their collective, overwhelming sense is that, like Howard, women voters are angry about what’s happening to Kavanaugh. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” says Melody Potter, the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party—the first woman to hold that position, she made sure to point out. In her state, the stakes of the Kavanaugh scandal are immense: Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is fighting for his seat in a place where more than two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. With voters “energized” to elect people “who are going to support President Trump,” Potter says, West Virginians are closely watching how Manchin acts on Kavanaugh—especially now that the situation has become so politicized.

Organizers in other states say they’ve been hearing the same thing. “People in Indiana are angry. They are mad. They are changing their mind,” says Jodi Smith, the Indianapolis-based state director for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List. When Senator Joe Donnelly, another vulnerable Democrat who is up for reelection in November, declared late last week that he would vote against Kavanaugh, it “started a firestorm of epic proportions,” Smith says. From her perspective on the ground in a highly contested swing state, “this is one of the best things that could happen to us.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Kavanaugh affair will work to the GOP’s advantage; recent polling has not conclusively shown what women, for example, think about these allegations. “If the Republicans don’t get it together and make sure that he gets in there, that’s not going to help us,” says Howard, the Georgia RNC official. “What makes me mad at times about our party is we don’t stand up enough and say, ‘Enough of your shenanigans! We’re not putting up with this!’” And with the full Senate vote delayed and a supplemental FBI investigation under way, it’s not certain that Kavanaugh’s nomination will ultimately be successful.

But if Kavanaugh is confirmed, Howard says, “that will fire up the base even more to say, ‘Look at what a fight we had on our hands.’”

This is what they want.  They want white women to forget about losing their health care, to forget about kids in interment camps, to forget that they were wavering on support.for the GOP, to forget that women overall supported Democrats by more than 20 points.

They want angry white women to vote to protect their white men and white boys against those evil liberals, because our white boys don't assault anyone, they are noble and pure and good.  Their savage animals of men assault us.

It's working.  All of the "concessions" and "concerns" and "uncertainty" over Kavanaugh is there for a reason.  Mitch could have had this vote wrapped up by mid-September if he wanted to.  Instead, he wanted outrage just in time for the Midterms.

And once again, white women are going to come out in favor of the GOP.  All those stories about white women in suburban districts looking like shaky support at best?  This fight was engineered to put that to rest.  They will sign their reproductive freedom away because it will hurt those women more.

Democrats better treat the last month as the fight of their lives.

Because it is.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Republicans, angered by the Kavanaugh confirmation process, are starting to narrow the gap in the polls, according to NPR at least.

Just over a month away from critical elections across the country, the wide Democratic enthusiasm advantage that has defined the 2018 campaign up to this point has disappeared, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. 

In July, there was a 10-point gap between the number of Democrats and Republicans saying the November elections were "very important." Now, that is down to 2 points, a statistical tie. 

Democrats' advantage on which party Americans want to control Congress has also been cut in half since last month. Democrats still retain a 6-point edge on that question, but it was 12 points after a Marist poll conducted in mid-September. 

The results come amid the pitched and hotly partisan confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. Multiple women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when he was in high school and college. He categorically denies all the allegations. The FBI is conducting a supplemental investigation into the accusations that is expected to be wrapped up by the end of this week. 

With Democrats already up fired up for this election, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight has apparently had the effect of rousing a dormant GOP base. 

"The result of hearings, at least in short run, is the Republican base was awakened," noted Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. 

While Democrats and Republicans are now equally enthusiastic about the midterms, the story is very different for key Democratic base groups and independents. While 82 percent of Democrats say the midterms are very important, that's true of just 60 percent of people under 30, 61 percent of Latinos and 65 percent of independents. 

Democrats need to net 23 seats to take back control of the House, but if those groups stay home in large numbers, it would blunt potential Democratic gains. With 34 days to go until Election Day, it all points to another election dominated by party activists.

Once again, Democrats need to act like they are losing by ten and get out there every day to make the case as to why they need to win.

Republicans will absolutely show up in the midterms, regardless.

The only question is Democratic turnout.  If it's 2010 or 2014 levels again, the country is finished.

Deportation Nation, Con't

If you want to know why Trump's child internment camps are being expanded, it's because in addition to family separation of undocumented migrant kids being locked up in cages like animals, we're about to do the same thing to tens of thousands of US kids with full citizenship as families of formerly protected undocumented immigrants under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program are going to be forcibly deported starting next year.

As of October 2017, there were roughly 300,000 TPS beneficiaries from 10 countries living in the United States. These individuals came from a handful of Central American and African countries, along with Haiti, Syria, Yemen and Nepal. But by far the largest group were Salvadorans — close to 200,000 — who were granted TPS by George W. Bush in 2001, following two massive earthquakes that ravaged their country.

Salvadorans were given 18 months to live and work legally in the United States, after which the U.S. government would assess the viability of their returning home. But 18 months later, the Bush administration determined El Salvador had not adequately recovered from the disaster, so it extended TPS again, this time for 12 months. The following year, the administration extended TPS for another 18 months. When Barack Obama became president in 2009, his administration extended TPS again. And then again. By Jan. 8, 2018, TPS for Salvadorans had been extended a total of 11 times. Trump issued a 12th extension, saying it would be the last.

Over nearly two decades, Salvadoran TPS recipients settled into American life. They found employment, fell in love and married. Many of them bought homes and started businesses. They also gave birth to roughly 192,700 American-born children, some 38,000 of whom live in the District, Maryland and Virginia.

“While nothing in the [TPS] statute suggests a pathway to permanent status, a lot of links and dependencies were created,” says Jayesh Rathod, a law professor and founding director of American University’s Immigrant Justice Clinic. “It’s only reasonable to assume that alongside the statutory factors, [previous administrations were] looking at the practical reality and how uprooting that community wouldn’t be feasible, not just to El Salvador, but to American children.”

In canceling TPS for Haitians, Hondurans, Nepalis, Sudanese, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, the Trump administration forced families like Emily’s to confront the question that past administrations had avoided: What would happen to all these American kids when their parents were officially ordered to leave the country?

The Department of Homeland Security had an answer. “We will coordinate with the Government of El Salvador to better understand what documents might be needed by U.S. citizen children to enroll in local schools, access local health services, or other social services,” a DHS spokeswoman wrote to me in June. In other words, the government expected nearly 193,000 American kids to leave the United States along with their parents. Simple as that.

Except it wasn’t. From the start, parents balked at the idea of uprooting their children from stable communities and removing them to a country plagued with poverty, corruption and gang violence. Come next September, many, perhaps most, will decide to take their chances by becoming undocumented and staying with their kids in the United States. But others, like Emily’s parents, may begin to see separation as a viable option — heading back to their country of origin while leaving their American-citizen children behind.

And so it goes.  We will deport or incarcerate (or both) tens of thousands more kids in the coming months.   They will be US citizens.

And Trump doesn't care.

StupidiNews!

• The US Secret Service is investigating suspicious letters sent to the White House and Pentagon containing what appears to be ricin. 
• The former Chicago police officer who shot unarmed black teen Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014 took the stand at his murder trial Tuesday, saying he had no choice but to open fire.
• Donald Trump claimed at a campaign rally in Mississippi last night that he told Saudi King Salman that "he wouldn't last two weeks" without support of the US military. 
• New York state tax authorities are opening an investigation into Donald Trump's finances based on yesterday's NY Times investigation into Trump's alleged history of tax fraud.
• The 2018 Nobel prize in physics has gone to an international team that researched laser beam "optical tweezers" technology, Canada's Donna Strickland is the first woman to share the prize in 55 years.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

The New York Times today published a massive investigation of Donald Trump's finances and straight up accuses the man in the White House of obtaining the seed of his fortune through decades of fraud.

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”

The president’s brother, Robert Trump, issued a statement on behalf of the Trump family:

“Our dear father, Fred C. Trump, passed away in June 1999. Our beloved mother, Mary Anne Trump, passed away in August 2000. All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid. Our father’s estate was closed in 2001 by both the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State tax authorities, and our mother’s estate was closed in 2004. Our family has no other comment on these matters that happened some 20 years ago, and would appreciate your respecting the privacy of our deceased parents, may God rest their souls.”

The Times’s findings raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his income tax returns, breaking with decades of practice by past presidents. According to tax experts, it is unlikely that Mr. Trump would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for helping his parents evade taxes, because the acts happened too long ago and are past the statute of limitations. There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud.

The findings are based on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire. They include documents culled from public sources — mortgages and deeds, probate records, financial disclosure reports, regulatory records and civil court files.

The investigation also draws on tens of thousands of pages of confidential records — bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks. Most notably, the documents include more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. While the records do not include the president’s personal tax returns and reveal little about his recent business dealings at home and abroad, dozens of corporate, partnership and trust tax returns offer the first public accounting of the income he received for decades from various family enterprises.

What emerges from this body of evidence is a financial biography of the 45th president fundamentally at odds with the story Mr. Trump has sold in his books, his TV shows and his political life. In Mr. Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free of his father’s “tiny” outer-borough operation and parlayed a single $1 million loan from his father (“I had to pay him back with interest!”) into a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos, airlines and golf courses the world over. In Mr. Trump’s version, it was always his guts and gumption that overcame setbacks. Fred Trump was simply a cheerleader.

“I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times.

Certainly a handful of journalists and biographers, notably Wayne Barrett, Gwenda Blair, David Cay Johnston and Timothy L. O’Brien, have challenged this story, especially the claim of being worth $10 billion. They described how Mr. Trump piggybacked off his father’s banking connections to gain a foothold in Manhattan real estate. They poked holes in his go-to talking point about the $1 million loan, citing evidence that he actually got $14 million. They told how Fred Trump once helped his son make a bond payment on an Atlantic City casino by buying $3.5 million in casino chips.

But The Times’s investigation of the Trump family’s finances is unprecedented in scope and precision, offering the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life. The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth.

Donald Trump's money is dirty as hell and always has been, and this is before you factor in the Russian money laundering, crooked real estate deals, mobbed-up casinos and payouts to porn stars.  This one is going to be a field day, and remember:

Whatever the NYT knows, Robert Mueller knows more.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

L'Affair Kavanaugh continues to rage across the political landscape right now, but let's not forget why Trump needs Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court ASAP: as the deciding vote to shield Trump from the consequences of the Mueller probe.

As former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen continues to cooperate with the Mueller probe as part of his August plea deal, details are starting to leak out about Donald Trump's personal involvement in the efforts to obstruct justice through the hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels about her alleged affair with Trump, and the subsequent cover-up of that arrangement. 

Now we find out today from the Wall Street Journal that Trump not only knew about the hush money and the cover-up, but  that Trump personally directed Cohen and his son Eric Trump to handle the legal action against Daniels.

President Trump personally directed an effort in February to stop Stormy Daniels from publicly describing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, people familiar with the events say.

In a phone call, Mr. Trump instructed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to seek a restraining order against the former adult-film actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, through a confidential arbitration proceeding, one of the people said. Messrs. Trump and Cohen had learned shortly before that Ms. Clifford was considering giving a media interview about her alleged relationship with Mr. Trump, despite having signed an October 2016 nondisclosure agreement.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohen to coordinate the legal response with Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, and another outside lawyer who had represented Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization in other matters, the people said. Eric Trump, who is running the company with his brother in Mr. Trump’s absence, then tasked a Trump Organization staff attorney in California with signing off on the arbitration paperwork, these people said.

Direct involvement of the president and his son in the effort to silence Ms. Clifford hasn’t previously been reported. The accounts of that effort recently provided to The Wall Street Journal suggest that the president’s ties to his company continued into this year and contradict public statements made at the time by the Trump Organization, the White House and Mr. Cohen.

The White House referred a request for comment to the president’s outside counsel. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, declined to comment. A person close to the situation said Eric Trump had acted as the president’s son and not in his role as a company executive. The Trump Organization declined to comment. Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, declined to comment.

In March, the Trump Organization denied any role in the arbitration, saying its lawyer assisted in her “individual capacity.” At the same time, the White House issued blanket denials when asked about a hush payment to Ms. Clifford and directed questions to Mr. Cohen, who had called the deal a private transaction between himself and the former adult-film star. Mr. Trump has denied any sexual encounter with Ms. Clifford.

Trump not only lied about Daniels, he personally directed his son and the Trump Organization to handle the dirty work.

And Mueller knows all about it.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

This may all be over now: Trump regime Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury in his Senate testimony last week if this NBC News story is true, and if so, he's fried like an egg on a sidewalk in Phoenix in July.

In the days leading up to a public allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself to a college classmate, the judge and his team were communicating behind the scenes with friends to refute the claim, according to text messages obtained by NBC News.

Kerry Berchem, who was at Yale with both Kavanaugh and his accuser, Deborah Ramirez, has tried to get those messages to the FBI for its newly reopened investigation into the matter but says she has yet to be contacted by the bureau.

The texts between Berchem and Karen Yarasavage, both friends of Kavanaugh, suggest that the nominee was personally talking with former classmates about Ramirez’s story in advance of the New Yorker article that made her allegation public. In one message, Yarasavage said Kavanaugh asked her to go on the record in his defense. Two other messages show communication between Kavanaugh's team and former classmates in advance of the story.

In now-public transcripts from an interview with Republican Judiciary Committee staff on September 25, two days after the Ramirez allegations were reported in the New Yorker, Kavanaugh claimed that it was Ramirez who was “calling around to classmates trying to see if they remembered it,” adding that it “strikes me as, you know, what is going on here? When someone is calling around to try to refresh other people? Is that what’s going on? What’s going on with that? That doesn’t sound — that doesn’t sound — good to me. It doesn’t sound fair. It doesn’t sound proper. It sounds like an orchestrated hit to take me out.”

The texts also demonstrate that Kavanaugh and Ramirez were more socially connected than previously understood and that Ramirez was uncomfortable around Kavanaugh when they saw each other at a wedding 10 years after they graduated. Berchem's efforts also show that some potential witnesses have been unable to get important information to the FBI.

This is bad enough, but if these texts are true, they are direct evidence of perjury.  And he may have done so multiple times.  First, in closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary on September 25:

Berchem's texts with Yarasavage shed light on Kavanaugh’s personal contact with friends, including that he obtained a copy of a photograph of a small group of friends from Yale at a 1997 wedding in order to show himself smiling alongside Ramirez 10 years after they graduated. Both were in the wedding party: Kavanaugh was a groomsman and Ramirez a bridesmaid at the wedding.

On Sept, 22nd, Yarasavage texted Berchem that she had shared the photo with “Brett’s team.”

But when Kavanaugh was asked about the wedding during a committee interview on Sept. 25th, he said he was “probably” at a wedding with Ramirez. Asked if he interacted with her at the wedding, Kavanaugh replied, “I am sure I saw her because it wasn’t a huge wedding,” but added that he “doesn’t have a specific recollection.” Lying to Congress is a felony whether testimony is taken under oath or not. 

Second, he lied in the public hearing last week under oath.

Further, the texts show Kavanaugh may need to be questioned about how far back he anticipated that Ramirez would air allegations against him. Berchem says in her memo that Kavanaugh “and/or” his friends “may have initiated an anticipatory narrative” as early as July to “conceal or discredit” Ramirez.

Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath that the first time he heard of Ramirez’s allegation was in the Sept. 23 article in The New Yorker.

Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, when he first heard of Ramirez’s allegations. Kavanaugh answered: “In the New Yorker story.”

Kavanaugh was discussing the allegations of Deborah Ramirez with mutual acquaintances before the New Yorker article based on her allegations was published. 

We now find out that these discussions may have happened as early as July, when Kavanaugh was first nominated.  Which means they knew the allegations were coming, "they" in this case being Kavnaugh's team, the Trump White House, and almost certainly Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley.  This is a whole other nasty mess that if true, merits a far-reaching investigation of its own because there should have been no reason to nominate Kavanaugh if they knew these allegations were coming...unless the fix was already in.

That's yet another fight for another day.

But when Kavanaugh answered Sen. Hatch's question about the first time hearing of the allegations being that New Yorker story, he lied under oath.  That's perjury.  That's ballgame.

Period.

Game over.

He's done.

Stay tuned.

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