Tag: Trump

Lyin’ Kris Kobach held in contempt

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

One of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s witnesses testified Tuesday in federal court that his research does not support Kobach’s previous claims that millions of illegal votes cost President Donald Trump the popular vote. via bridgesfreezefirst

Trump adviser Kobach is the Republican patron saint of voter-suppression fuckery, and it’s always cheering when he gets slapped by his betters:

A federal judge has ordered that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach be held in contempt of court for disobeying her orders in the proof-of-citizenship voter registration case.

Judge Julie Robinson in her decision Wednesday bashed Kobach’s failure to send postcards to voters whose registrations were restored by her previous move to block the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the 2016 election.

“Kansans have come to expect these postcards to confirm their registration status, and Defendant ensured the Court on the record that they had been sent prior to the 2016 general election,” Robinson said. “They were not, and the fact that he sent a different notice to those voters does not wholly remove the contempt, nor does his attempt to resend postcards eighteen months after the election and five months after Plaintiffs notified him of the issue.”

She also took issue with Kobach’s refusal to update the state’s training manual for election officials to reflect her 2016 order blocking the proof-of-citizenship requirement. Kobach had argued that he need not change the manual until the Supreme Court had a chance to weigh in on the case, and that he communicated with election officials via email the changes in policy due to her 2016 order.

How Comey helped Donald Trump win

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Best Buddies – The Mueller/Comey Connection

Greg Sargent explains.

As Jonathan Chait explains, Comey’s willingness to let such concerns influence these episodes reflects the success of a decades-long campaign by Republicans and GOP-aligned media to skew the political dialog by hyping fake scandals, which in this case led Comey to act to “avoid charges of favoritism,” thus willingly handing bad-faith actors leverage over law enforcement. It’s hard to read Comey’s NPR interview as anything other than confirmation of this. Worse, Comey also revealed that not allowing this to happen would have been a perfectly appropriate outcome.

All of this implicates the media’s conduct as well — both before and after the fact. Though Comey’s last-minute email revelation admittedly created a complicated editorial conundrum, it was widely hyped by the media in a manner that was surely disproportionate, given that at the time, no one knew whether the emails amounted to anything at all (which, it turned out, they didn’t). As Nate Silver has shown, the episode may have helped tip the election to Trump.

When supporters of Clinton made these points after the election, they were widely derided for being in denial about the real reasons Clinton lost. The notion that Comey and related over-the-top press coverage might have played an important role was greeted — including by some neutral reporters — as self-evidently, uproariously, knee-slappingly absurd, as if it constituted nothing more than hopeless partisan brainwashing.

It is true that Clinton lost for all kinds of other reasons, including her own role in emailgate, her flaws as a candidate, multiple strategic failures by the campaign and various unhealthy tendencies in the Democratic Party. But as Comey himself has now confirmed, the conduct for which he was responsible didn’t have to happen. Comey won’t allow himself to take this extra step, but his own retrospective testimony also confirms that it should not have happened. It likely helped Trump win, and to the degree that it did, it produced genuine institutional and systemic failure on multiple fronts. Comey’s media tour should lead us to forthrightly grapple with this — and to acknowledge that Clinton supporters are absolutely right to be bitterly angry over it to this day.

So your Trump-loving brother-in-law is paying for Stormy Daniels

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Michael Avenatti says Michael Cohen to plead Fifth, seek 'emergency stay' in Stormy Daniels lawsuit

And worth every penny!

President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign has spent about $835,000 in legal fees so far this year, or about 22% of its total spending, according to the latest fundraising reports filed quarterly with the Federal Election Commission.

The spending comes as Trump deals with the intensifying special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, as well as an ongoing legal battle with adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford.

The campaign’s legal consulting spending went to at least eight different firms and the Trump Corporation. The bulk of the spending, about $350,000, went to Jones Day, which has represented the campaign since the 2016 election, including any litigation related to it.

Two others firms — Harding LLP and Larocca, Hornik, Rosen, Greenberg & Blaha, which are involved in the legal fight with Daniels — were paid a combined $280,000.

Using campaign funds to pay for the president’s mounting legal fees related to Daniels and the Russia investigation means that the money small-dollar donors are giving to the president’s campaign isn’t all going toward traditional reelection efforts like ads, campaign staff payroll, and fundraising.

Oh my man I love him so

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Russia’s Putin predicts global ‘chaos’ if West hits Syria again | World

Trump and Putin, star-crossed lovers:

Former president Barack Obama had a tense relationship with Putin. Trump said he could do better but felt stymied by the media, Congress and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Any conciliatory move he made toward Putin came under heavy scrutiny. “When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship is a good thing,” Trump tweeted in November. “They are always playing politics — bad for our country.”

Privately, he complained to aides that the media’s fixation on the Mueller probe was hobbling his effort to woo Putin. “I can’t put on the charm,” the president often said, according to one of his advisers. “I’m not able to be president because of this witch hunt.”

As the months passed, the president’s options for improving relations with Russia narrowed. In late July, Congress overwhelmingly approved new sanctions on Moscow that were widely seen as a rebuke of Trump’s efforts to reach out to Putin. It took aides four days to persuade Trump to sign the bill, which had cleared with a veto-proof majority.

Read the whole thing. Sure smells like collusion!

More on the alleged Trump love child

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Battery Place

President Donald Trump had a relationship with a former housekeeper that produced a child, a former Trump World Tower doorman claimed in a statement released Thursday afternoon. The doorman, Dino Sajudin, spoke out after reports published Thursday morning detailed his agreement with American Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer that included a $30,000 payment for the exclusive rights to the story. Continue reading “More on the alleged Trump love child” →

I don’t like Jim Comey

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Variety. (2018, March 6). James Comey [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/comey.png?w=1000&h=563&crop=1

But I do like gossip, so I’m probably going to read his book. Here’s a summary.

Also:

Trump’s spy

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Another one bites the dust...

Trump sent his spy to keep tabs on Sessions — and the Russia investigation:

President Donald Trump personally ordered the Department of Justice to hire a former White House official who was fired after he was caught up in a controversy over the release of intelligence material to a member of Congress, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who left the National Security Council last year, will advise Attorney General Jeff Sessions on national security matters. He was fired from the White House following reports that he had shown House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes classified documents.

The material allegedly revealed that members of the Obama administration had sought the identities of Trump campaign officials and associates inadvertently caught on government intercepts, in a process known as “unmasking.” Nunes then disclosed that information publicly in an attempt to bolster Trump’s unsubstantiated allegation that President Barack Obama had wiretapped him.

As a matter of policy, the White House generally doesn’t approve the rehiring of staff who were fired, aides said. But after it became clear the president wanted Cohen-Watnick on Sessions’ staff, the move was approved.

Heh, heh: Chris Christie said ‘taint committee’

~ susie

https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2018/04/christie-no-attorney-client-privilege

My late mother used to say, “Thank God for unanswered prayers.”

I have to think Chris Christie says that to himself a lot these days. What a lucky guy, to sidestep the public shitstorm that is the reckless and lawless Trump administration. And after his own shady Bridgegate scandal, something on the scale of the Mueller investigation would have been a daily cluster migraine.

See, Chris? Being pushed out of the transition team by Mike Pence was a blessing in disguise!

Today Christie and Dan Abrams appeared on Good Morning America, talking to George Stephanopoulos about the raid on Michael Cohen’s office yesterday.

“The attorney-client privilege is not dead,” Christie said in response to Trump’s early-morning tweet. “There is an exception which means that if the authorities believe that the president and his lawyer or anyone and their lawyer are together engaged in a possible crime or fraud, then the attorney/client privilege doesn’t necessarily apply. We don’t know exactly,” he said.

“We heard from the president on this right now. He said the attorney/client privilege is dead, total witch-hunt,” Stephanopoulos said.

“It is not dead because the way the Justice Department will approach it,” Christie said. there will be a taint team because you don’t want to taint the prosecutors investigating it by seeing potentially privileged information they have no right to see.”

(Heh, heh. He said “taint”!)

“They’ll separate it into stuff that’s privileged and stuff that isn’t and then of the stuff that’s privileged is in any evidence of a crime or fraud, that’s an ongoing crime or fraud.

“It would have to be between the two of them,” Abrams said. “If they think President Trump may have committed a crime, there’s still an attorney-client privilege there.”

“It’s got to be a conspiracy-like situation, George, that they see clear evidence,” Christie said.

“And let’s remember one other thing: people will try to jump to conclusions about a lot of things. The only thing we know for sure is what I said a long time ago to you, which is there’s no way you make this investigation shorter, but there’s lots of ways you can make it longer.”

Who’s draining the swamp?

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

The man who’s threatening to fire Robert Mueller, or Robert Mueller?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing Mr. Mueller as a savior, an omniscient narrator who will soon reveal all. While there’s no way of knowing how important this narrative of corruption will be to the investigation as a whole, it does make plain that many of the problems unearthed by the special counsel are beyond his power as a prosecutor to resolve.

Instead, addressing them will require political will. The prosecution of Mr. Manafort may bring some justice, for example, but the loopholes that made his graft possible continue to exist for others to potentially exploit. In the absence of stricter, better-enforced regulations, foreign money will still be able to flow into United States elections.

These are issues to which Mr. Mueller cannot provide a solution, however long the public waits. Mr. Mueller is both a prosecutor and a storyteller. But the response to the story he tells is up to the country to determine through politics.