Trump Distractions Are Pure Lies & Deception….In this part 1 section, Trump distractions are exposed in examples like his IG report spin or signing a vague document with Jong Un. The report from the Office of Inspector General released yesterday was initially triggered by Trump & his propaganda squad unleashing yet another conspiracy theory, hoping something will resonate to smear the FBI & cast doubt over the entire Russian investigation. It was 18 months in the making & fell flat with those of us outside echo-world, since there was nothing really new in there & can accurately be portrayed as a nothing burger. There were disclosures Comey did not follow proper procedures & two lovers were exchanging anti-Trump messages, but the Trump distractions he was hoping for never materialized, since the report refutes any notion of politically-motivated biases from some nefarious deep state. The one part of the 500 some-odd page report the echo-clowns tried to blow out of proportion (& they’re bloviating hard), out of a FBI organization with 37,000 agents, one lone agent (Peter Strzok) replied to his girlfriend’s message they can stop Trump (perhaps said only in jest). First of all, we have freedom of speech so in America we should be able to express our opinions with our significant other, but also there are no indications his statement was ever part of a wider organizational effort.
It’s impossible to remove all political biases, since that would require removing the human condition & all of us turning into robots, but FBI agents just can’t carry that over to their jobs. If anything, Comey’s actions actually showed a bias in favor of Trump. Although both campaigns were under federal investigation, Comey told the public about the Hillary probe the week before the election, which may have cost her the win: doj-fbi-clinton-not-trump-
And I just heard the wanna-be American gestapo enforcer, the prez’s TV lawyer Rudy, say he wants to throw the investigators within the FBI in jail. He also mentioned the prez’s team resolve to abuse their power by throwing pardon smoke signals out there. They know there are plenty of nefarious activities that were a routine part of the Trump campaign, which they’ll stop at nothing to hide it all. Folks, as I keep saying, & don’t dismiss the possibility, if we’re not vigilant fascism could come to America!: Branding-the-New-Flavor-of-
Inside five-takeaways-on-the-justice-
Another article providing clear perspectives on why we can’t believe Trump’s crazy spin on the IG report is posted here from doj-report-finds-no-evidence-
Donald Trump has claimed that a secret cabal of “deep state” Democrats within the FBI “rigged” the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton — thereby allowing her to escape accountability for violations of information-security protocol that should have landed her in prison — even as said cabal orchestrated a “WITCH HUNT” into his campaign’s nonexistent ties to Russian hacking, in a diabolical, anti-democratic bid to get Clinton elected. In light of these (alternative) “facts,” the president maintains that the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election— and his own alleged attempts to interfere with that investigation — is so “corrupt” and baseless, it should be ended as soon as possible.
There are several reasons to question Trump’s word on this subject. To name a few:
• A new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general “found no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors” in the Clinton email investigation “were affected by bias or other improper considerations … Rather, we concluded that they were based on the prosecutor’s assessment of facts, the law, and past department practice.”
• The president is known liar who frequently, publicly admits that he likes to tell lies.
• Trump has made many, many specific claims about “deep state” conspiracies against him that have proven to be completely false.
• Donald Trump Jr. has publicly confessed to accepting an ostensible offer of opposition research from the Russian government, while Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos has admitted to seeking thousands of stolen Clinton emails from a woman he believed to be Vladimir Putin’s niece.
• Donald Trump has admitted, on national television, that he fired James Comey (at least, in part) because he disapproved of the FBI director’s handling of an investigation into his campaign (an act that would ostensibly constitute obstruction of justice). He subsequently argued — in many, many interviews — that the job of the attorney general is to protect the president from legal scrutiny – and that he, as president, has the absolute authority to shut down any investigation he does not like. (This seems like a reasonable basis for investigating the possibility that the president has tried to obstruct justice).
• In the days preceding the 2016 election, the FBI leaked word to the New York Times that there was “no clear link between Trump and Russia,” and publicly announced the reopening of its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server — on the basis of new evidence that turned out to be neither “new” nor “evidence.” (This seems like an odd way for a Democratic cabal dedicated to the election of Hillary Clinton to approach its mission.)
• The special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign has already produced many indictments of — and criminal confessions from — Trump campaign members.
• The president has urged world leaders to call him on his easily hackable personal phone, over the objections of cybersecurity experts, because doing so is “convenient.” (It seems hard to square this behavior with Trump’s insistence that violations of IT protocol are such a serious offense, only a conspiracy can explain why the Justice Department did not prosecute Hillary Clinton for committing one with her personal email server.)
On the other hand, the Justice Department report released Thursday does include this exchange of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok, who worked on the Clinton and Russia investigations, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page (the first text is from Page, the latter, from Strzok:
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
Now, Strzok says that the text message was “was intended to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation.” And the broader DOJ report finds no evidence that Strzok did anything to undermine the integrity of the Clinton investigation. In fact, as James Comey notes in a New York Times op-ed on the report, the inspector general’s report affirms the FBI’s conclusion that Clinton’s actions weren’t prosecutable. FBI agents are allowed to have political opinions and partisan allegiances. And, to state the obvious, the FBI did not stop Trump from becoming president; in fact, there is significant evidence that bureau aided in his election. Finally, the report concludes that Comey’s decision to publicly announce the discovery of new Clinton emails in October 2016 — a development that correlated with a drop in Clinton’s poll numbers — was an inappropriate act of insubordination. (It also, ironically, finds that Comey repeatedly conducted official FBI business from his personal Gmail account, in violation of protocol.)
Charity Scam Exposed!
New York State attorney general Barbara Underwood has only been on the job for a couple of weeks, but on Thursday she dropped a bombshell, suing Donald Trump, his three oldest children, and the Trump Foundation for “persistently illegal conduct.” Underwood alleges misuse of foundation funds, a pattern of self-dealing, and illegal coordination between the foundation and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In the suit, Underwood asks a judge to dissolve the foundation and force Trump to pay $2.8 million in restitution. She also wants him barred from serving as the head of a nonprofit for ten years. Underwood is asking the judge to give the same penalty, but for only one year, to Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump, who are all board members of the foundation. “As our investigation reveals, the Trump Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality,” Underwood said in a statement. “This is not how private foundations should function and my office intends to hold the Foundation and its directors accountable for its misuse of charitable assets.”
The lawsuit is full of examples of how Trump allegedly misused foundation funds. Among them are the $5,000 it paid to advertise Trump Hotels, the $10,000 it paid for a Trump portrait found hanging in one of his golf resorts, and the $258,000 it paid to settle lawsuits against Trump and his businesses. Underwood has also taken issue with the foundation’s alignment with Trump’s presidential campaign. This became an issue after he skipped a Fox News debate in January of 2016 and instead hosted a charity event to raise money for veterans, but also for him to rip his opponents. That event raised $2.8 million for the Trump Foundation to dole out to charity, but quickly “the Foundation ceded control over the charitable funds it raised to senior Trump Campaign staff,” the lawsuit says. Included in the suit are emails from Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, coordinating the donations with a foundation staffer. His goal was to dole them out in such a way as to benefit the campaign. “Is there any way we can make some disbursements this week while in Iowa?” Lewandowski wrote the staffer in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
Other articles showing Trump & his family could be exposed for horrendously corrupt activities, with their charity basically operating as a scam, are seen in links like the-disastrous-legal-
You might say the same about Trump’s entire business career. As I’ve argued before, Trump wasn’t just a guy who skated close to the line a time or two or broke a few rules. In fact, when you add up the questionable bankruptcies; the cons such as Trump University; the pyramid schemes; the contacts with mobsters; the exploitation of foreign workers; the Trump projects that have collapsed amid charges of double-dealing; the unusual interest Russian oligarchs have in using Trump properties as a vehicle for money laundering, and more, Donald Trump could well be the most corrupt major business figure in America. So why would anyone expect his foundation to be an above-board charity that does good work and would never run afoul of the law?
Often in recent years, Michael Cohen has said such things as, “I will do anything to protect Mr. Trump,” or “I will always protect our @POTUS.” What he’d do if his loyalty were tested was always an important question, because of the assumption — shared by both the president’s critics and his defenders — that if Cohen flipped on President Trump, he could do some real damage. Almost no one honestly believes that there isn’t plenty of criminality within Trump’s business dealings, so if Cohen starts singing like a bird, the president could be in serious trouble. And now that day may have arrived:
As attorneys for Michael Cohen rush to meet Judge Kimba Wood’s Friday deadline to complete a privilege review of over 3.7 million documents seized in the April 9 raids of Cohen’s New York properties and law office, a source representing this matter has disclosed to ABC News that the law firm handling the case for Cohen is not expected to represent him going forward. To date, Cohen has been represented by Stephen Ryan and Todd Harrison of the Washington and New York firm, McDermott, Will & Emery LLP. No replacement counsel has been identified as of this time. Cohen, now with no legal representation, is likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York, sources said. This development, which is believed to be imminent, will likely hit the White House, family members, staffers and counsels hard.
The connection between Cohen’s attorneys leaving and the possibility of him flipping is not that you don’t still need a lawyer if you’re cooperating (you do), but that these particular lawyers have been paid by the Trump campaign. That would mean that they’d have a conflict in representing him if in fact he is going to testify to something Trump or others involved in the Trump campaign might have done.
Mueller said in a court filing this week the foreign meddling operations continue to this day. Dan Coats concurs with warnings about the Russian threat to the coming midterms in these excerpts from the-director-of-national-
Dan Coats, the former Republican senator who is now director of national intelligence, warned that Moscow is currently mounting information warfare against the United States that could influence the coming midterm elections. As Coats put it in his prepared remarks, he wanted to focus on two topics: “the threat from Russia” and “the importance of enduring relationships and information sharing with our European allies in the face of these threats.” Noting that in 2016, Russia “conducted an unprecedented influence campaign to interfere in the US electoral and political process,” Coats said that Russia has “pursued and will pursue even more aggressive cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns with the intent of degrading our democratic values and weakening our alliances.” He then dropped this shocker: “It is 2018, and we continue to see Russian targeting of American society in ways that could affect our midterm elections.” Coats’ use of the present tense was significant. He appeared to be saying that US intelligence has gathered information indicating that right now, Moscow is engaging in clandestine actions that would allow it to influence congressional campaigns.
I sincerely hope North Korea becomes serious about denuclearizing. All Americans should want that. Even if it makes Trump look like a hero should Jong Un comply, the other alternative of a nuclear North Korea run by a rogue dictator is too big an eminent threat to America, its allies in the region & the whole world. It’s far too early to know whether there was real substance to those Singapore talks, or just a mirage with Jong Un mostly playing Trump. We should consider the very real possibility Trump was so anxious for any type of signed agreement he could ballyhoo to help mask his mounting scandals back home, he could have staged this charade that produced no actual concessions from Jong Un. And that happy talk from Singapore might be taken as a signal by China & Russia that they’ll relax some of the tight sanctions on North Korea, especially oil, which in turn could reduce the pressure on Jong Un to need a deal. We should be able to detect signals in the months ahead as the details are being worked out, whether Jong Un appears to be sincere in his dismantling of their nuclear program or just trying to string us along. Consider that having nukes is the only reason he’s commanding all this attention in the first place, so his whole identity revolves around keeping them.
President Donald Trump and the American diplomatic delegation are celebrating what they see as a landmark agreement with North Korea reached during Tuesday’s summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Trump has committed to ending US military exercises, or “war games,” in South Korea with the eventual promise of removing the US military’s presence in South Korea altogether. North Korea committed to eventually denuclearize, but the details are fuzzy. They did not provide a current accounting of their nuclear arsenal, nor did they give a concrete timeline for denuclearization. Over the past 25 years, however, North Korea has similarly pledged to denuclearize multiple times and failed to do so at every turn — even after receiving much more substantial benefits than an end to US military exercises. The agreement signed on Tuesday is also strikingly similar to the first denuclearization pledge signed in 1993. On multiple occasions over the years, North Korean leaders or officials took part in peace and denuclearization agreements. But after multiple decades of signed statements and declarations, little progress has resulted.
1990s
North Korea first joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985, but didn’t sign an agreement formally committing to denuclearization until 1992 in a joint declaration with the South, where both nations agreed not to develop nuclear facilities or enrich uranium. Later that year, North Korea entered into a comprehensive safeguards agreement (CSA) to allow international inspectors periodic access to their facilities. Just a year later, however, the North Koreans withdrew from the NPT, claiming the inspectors were overstepping their boundaries. After withdrawing from the NPT, North Korea signed their first bilateral agreement with the US, promising a “a commitment to peace and security in a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.” At the same time, however, it kept inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at bay and later withdrew entirely from the organization. In a subsequent 1994 agreed framework, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear facilities in exchange for energy assistance from the West.
2000s
North Korea abided by the terms of the agreed framework for about 10 years before admitting to uranium enrichment and intercepting a US spy plane. It was at that point when the six-party talks were convened to get the de-nuclearization of North Korea back on track starting in 2003. They included representatives from Russia, China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and the US. In 2005, a new framework agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to dismantle its main nuclear plant in exchange for some substantial benefits including food and energy assistance, as well as having their illegally laundered assets un-frozen. Things went well at first. North Korea dismantled much of its Yongbon nuclear plant under the guidance of international inspectors, and had US sanctions lifted. But, everything unraveled when North Korea expelled those inspectors and resumed missile testing in 2009.
2010s
On February 29, 2012 the US and North Korea reached the “Leap Day Deal.” North Korea agreed to a freeze on all nuclear activities in exchange for food aid. The agreement also contained assurances of “no hostile intent” and a commitment to “peace and stability” on the Korean Peninsula. But just a little under a year later in 2013, North Korea tested its third nuclear device on the eve of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, spurring a new round of UN sanctions and international commendation. A third of North Korea’s missile tests and half of its nuclear tests have been preformed since 2013, despite all the anti-nuclear agreements and declarations they signed in the previous 20 years.
It’s hard to say if Trump is lying or just delusional about this spin: donald-trump-actually-seems-
President Donald Trump declared that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat, even though Kim Jong Un hasn’t committed to a timetable for giving up his regime’s weapons. “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump said on Twitter Wednesday shortly after arriving back in Washington from his meetings in Singapore with Kim. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Trump and Kim’s summit produced a historic handshake and a joint statement that committed North Korea to “complete denuclearization” without providing any details about how that would happen. The omission of the words “verifiable” and “irreversible” from the phrasing on denuclearization suggested North Korean resistance to Trump’s requests.
The lack of details contributed to an air of skepticism in Washington about what Trump accomplished, even from some Republicans. While the president won general praise for talking to Kim — instead of tweeting at him — even some Republicans were grasping for concrete takeaways and sounding cautious. “It’s important that we don’t lose sight of the fact that Kim Jong Un is a butcher and he is a butcher of his own people,” Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said Tuesday. “Trying to reason with someone like that is like trying to hand feed a shark. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but you’ve got to do it very, very carefully.” U.S. defense analysts have said Kim retains as many as 60 nuclear bombs and a range of missiles, including some he says can strike the U.S. North Korea has pledged to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula in virtually all agreements since 1992, but implementation has broken down due to a lack of consensus on what that means. Pyongyang has since pulled out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, built a complete nuclear fuel cycle, assembled an arsenal of nuclear weapons and developed the missiles to fire them.
There is good reason for Pompeo to get irritated. If you have told the world you will get “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” (now a term of art, CVID) and the document to sign doesn’t have all those parts, you have to explain why. Saying it’s implied is not an answer; if it was discussed and not put in the agreement, that’s actually worse. North Korea can maintain the position that it agreed only to what is in the document — no verification, no irreversibility — and the rest was simply discussion. Ending joint military exercises was not a concession the Trump team had voiced previously. Now that Trump gave it away, Pompeo says the exercises won’t take place if North Korea is negotiating in good faith. Really? That’s the oldest trick in the book — stall and when the United States says it will resume exercises, cry foul and blame the United States for the blowup. We are, quite frankly, giving away leverage before future negotiations. North Korea has zero incentive to give up anything anytime soon. It has gotten legitimacy, it has gotten rid of the military exercises, and it has gotten Trump to purr like a kitten. (There is no nuclear threat from North Korea anymore, he announces, raising the question then as to why any more negotiations are needed.) This has become a caricature of the Iran negotiations with a sometimes prickly Secretary of State John F. Kerry insisting — wrongly, it turned out — that he was getting everything he wanted.
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