Trump is a Jerk & he constantly proves it….Sorry if we’re offending anyone, but every message we send out shows Trump is a jerk, & here in today’s part 1 is no exception. Especially the last section below, it yet again clearly confirms how much Trump is a jerk. Here at TheVORACS.com, we are dedicated & constantly strive to provide you with the truth about our political discourse, so our readers can stay informed & share the facts with others. Revealing the truth is largely dependent on exposing the constant lying coming from Trump & his echo. That lying is designed to create confusion & chaos, dishing out falsehoods their base will believe so those loyal Trumpeters stay on their side no matter what the evidence from the Russian scandal will expose. These constant attacks on the DOJ, FBI, Mueller probe & media have no validity, but are just a massive PR campaign to prevent Trump from getting impeached from a political standpoint, even should Mueller deliver proof of crimes. It’s a free country, so Trumpeters have a right to be wrong, but as rational citizens we have the right to share the truth with them in the hopes they will finally see the light.
Mueller Probe
Trump keeps scheming with his minions to try turning public opinion against the investigation, so they’ll gain the political capital to shut it down. But the probe is closing in on him as more evidence comes out. Look for a Mueller bombshell that could land at any time, whether it’s a subpoena for the president, an obstruction report, or more indictments that hit even closer to him. Trump’s ever more desperate rants are reported in excerpts from report-trump-repeatedly-t
President Trump has repeatedly ranted about the ongoing Russia investigation and spoken of ending it during his working vacation at his Bedminster retreat, according to Politico. Close confidants cited in the report say the president’s mood has visibly soured any time special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is brought up. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), after golfing with Trump last weekend, reportedly told guests at an event hosted by the Greenville County Republican Party that the president mentioned ending the Mueller investigation “about 20 times.” Trump is reportedly channeling his frustrations over the investigation into his trade war with China and efforts for a border wall, a bid that is receiving encouragement from White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. After a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s family-separations policy, Miller is said to be masterminding additional immigration crackdowns ahead of midterms in the fall.
Watergate Revisited
The parallels to Nixon’s Watergate are in some ways remarkable, even down to the same 2 reporters working on the story, as seen in these posts from poll-trump-disliked-as-st
A new poll has found that President Trump is as strongly disliked by the American public as former President Nixon was shortly before he resigned from office. A new Marist College poll found that 45 percent rated Trump’s job performance as poor — the same percentage who said Nixon was doing poorly as president in a Harris poll, CNN reported Saturday. Twenty percent rated Trump’s job performance as excellent and another 20 percent said Trump was doing a “pretty good” job. Less than half of Republican respondents — 49 percent — said Trump was doing an excellent job, compared to 2 percent of Democrats surveyed. Nixon resigned from office 44 years ago this week following the Watergate controversy. According to the 1974 Harris poll, the majority of Americans — 56 percent — wanted him impeached and removed from office, CNN noted.
Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein, who helped expose Nixon and his role in Watergate with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, said last week that “what we are watching in the Trump presidency is worse than Watergate.” Bernstein criticized Republicans for not holding Trump accountable, saying the current party differs from the Republican “heroes” with Nixon who “demanded that he be transparent.” Woodward is working on a Trump administration exposé, which is expected to be released next month. “Fear: Trump in the White House” hits shelves on Sept. 11 — just weeks before the midterm elections. The Marist Poll was conducted July 19-22 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percentage points.
Stone is Sinking
As this mystery unfolds & the pieces to the puzzle are gradually put together over the Russian scandal, this puzzle has many tentacles which are branching out into intriguing drama such as stories like this: smiths-suspicious-money-
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into matters related to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone is heating up. On Thursday, radio host Randy Credico — who Stone has said helped him communicate with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign — was subpoenaed by Mueller’s team for grand jury testimony. Then, on Friday, one close Stone associate — Kristin Davis, the former “Manhattan Madam” — went in to give grand jury testimony in Washington. And another close Stone associate, political operative Andrew Miller, was held in contempt by a judge for refusing to give grand jury testimony.
The full extent of Mueller’s investigation into Stone is unclear. But it evidently focuses at least in part on whether he had any involvement in the matter of emails stolen from top Democrats during the presidential campaign. During the campaign, Stone was in communication with both the “Guccifer 2” persona controlled by Russian intelligence and with WikiLeaks. According to an indictment from Mueller’s team last month, Russian intelligence officers hacked Democrats’ emails, and distributed them to be posted. Those hacked emails that were from the DNC and John Podesta ended up in WikiLeaks’ hands, and the group posted them. Stone’s role in this, if any, has remained mysterious. He has denied any wrongdoing, but his story about what did happen has changed repeatedly.
A Buffet of News
In other recent Trump news, Oh Lordy she has tapes: omarosa-claims-she-abso
Trump keeps spewing out his garbage to muddy the waters, especially when he dislikes someone, which the conservative media & his merry band of Trumpeters keep eating up the barbs: trump-fbi-tweets-jeff-s
What is Whataboutism?
It’s the crazy conspiracies Trump constantly uses to paint false equivalencies, as seen in this article posted below from dont-fall-for-trumps-late
PRESIDENT TRUMP tweets it repeatedly: Yes, there was collusion with Russia — except the real colluders were Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. The president was back at it again Thursday, quoting a conservative cable host’s assertion that “Hillary Clinton & the Democrats colluded with the Russians to fix the 2016 election.” This inflammatory argument may play well with the president’s supporters and others inclined to believe the worst about Ms. Clinton. But the claim that Ms. Clinton’s 2016 opposition- research activities were on the same moral or legal plane with the Trump team’s direct interactions with Russians represents a preposterous effort to confuse and distract.
Here is what the Trump team did: Senior campaign officials, including then-chairman Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, met in June 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected lawyer. They were told the lawyer could give them “very high level and sensitive information” on Ms. Clinton, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Here is what the Clinton campaign did: It employed a U.S. law firm that hired a U.S. research outfit that brought in Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy, to gather information on Mr. Trump from his network of sources. That network included Russians.
For all of Mr. Trump’s efforts to muddy the waters, the two cases are decidedly different. There is no evidence of any direct meetings or even tenuous connections between Ms. Clinton’s senior staff and Russian operatives. When the information he was gathering on Mr. Trump seemed alarming, Mr. Steele informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his concerns. When the Russian government offered dirt on Mr. Trump’s opponent, his campaign didn’t alert authorities about this sketchy behavior. It eagerly took the meeting. Mr. Trump’s whataboutism obscures the fundamental difference between engaging in opposition research that includes contacting foreign sources and lapping up information peddled by a foreign government. Mr. Steele, a well-regarded ex-spy, was acting as a compensated researcher with a specialty in Russia, not as a Kremlin cutout. He worked his network to deliver information to his client.
By contrast, Mr. Trump’s team opened itself to legal exposure when it took the unsolicited meeting with Ms. Veselnitskaya. It is illegal for foreign governments to contribute — in a broad sense of the word — to U.S. political campaigns. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics,” Mr. Trump tweeted the other day. The efforts the president and others made to cover up the purpose of the meeting suggest otherwise. And the fact that the damaging information was not forthcoming, at least at that meeting, does not excuse the sordid fact of the meeting in the first instance. One of Mr. Trump’s go-to defenses is insisting that others have done the things he is accused of, only worse. No matter how many times he tweets about Ms. Clinton’s supposed collusion, that doesn’t make it true, nor does it diminish legitimate concerns about his own campaign’s behavior. And that is even assuming there is nothing more to learn.
Strzok gets Canned
Peter Strzok made the mistake in 2016 of sending personal messages critical of Trump to his mistress. While there are zero signs of him taking action against Trump during the campaign & there was no grand conspiracy to get Trump within the FBI, nonetheless his firing was no surprise based on the way he became a political pinata for Trump & his henchmen. The evidence actually suggests there was a far stronger anti-Hillary sentiment running throughout the FBI, but Trump-world never wants to waste a good conspiracy theory if they can concoct one. With Trump as an aspiring dictator, he has fired or constantly criticized many higher-ups in the DOJ/FBI, particularly those who haven’t displayed a disposition to bow to him, plus he wants to navigate a path to get at Mueller. In Trump’s reckless & seemingly desperate words & deeds, it looks as though he knows if he fails to take down Mueller, that probe is going to take down his presidency. Some disturbing signs about the real reasons for the Strzok firing are seen in peter-strzok-fired-from-fbi
One of the clearest dividing lines between authoritarian regimes and democratic republics is the apolitical functioning of rule of law. The power of dictatorship is not just the power to protect the guilty and prosecute the innocent. It is also the power to punish your political rivals because they are your political rivals. And in a more banal way, it is also the power to get rid of law enforcement officials who don’t march in lockstep with the political vision of the leader. The politicization of rule of law is, therefore, a serious threat to democracy. I’ve interviewed authoritarian heads of state in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. Off the record, they’ll admit that they deliberately politicized rule of law in order to crush dissent and remove constraints on their power. To achieve that goal, they usually launch two parallel campaigns. First, create the public perception that rule of law is already highly politicized against the leader in power. Second, use that pretext to much more aggressively politicize rule of law against the leader’s political opponents.
More troublesome signs of the Strzok firing from a president trying to set a precedent where he can command loyalty & run roughshod over the independent nature of the intelligence agencies, are found in these excerpts from peter-strzoks-firing-sets
Even at this late stage, many commentators still take it for granted that Trump’s attempts to curb the independence of key political institutions will miraculously be foiled by the Constitution. But Strzok’s firing is only the latest in a series of cases in which high-ranking civil servants have been personally attacked by the president and then been forced to leave office under highly unusual circumstances: At this point, Trump has managed to dispatch the FBI’s director, its deputy director, its general counsel, and the head agent of its investigating agency.
This is worrying for two important reasons. First, it sends a clear message to rank-and-file bureaucrats across different agencies: If you value your career, you better stay in the president’s good books. It will take years or decades until we gain the full measure to which this message may already be swaying supposedly apolitical decisions at all levels of the government. And if the message keeps being sent in ever more high-profile cases, we will have to start worrying that political pressure could influence the behavior of key institutions in ways that are directly inimical to the proper functioning of a democracy (like, for example, an investigation of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate on trumped-up charges).
Second, it should make us very concerned about the impending clash between Trump and his real target: Robert Mueller. As Rep. Devin Nunes recently reminded us in his shocking remarks at a private fundraiser, many Republican legislators are now determined to defend the president against any meaningful investigation at just about any cost. The received wisdom remains that Trump cannot possibly win such an open confrontation. If Trump removes Mueller, the smart money says, it would mark the effective end of his presidency. But so far, Trump has amassed a strikingly strong batting average when it came to getting the targets of his ire fired from their jobs.
So if the strange saga of Peter Strzok does nothing else, it should refocus our attention on the urgency of defending the independence of our key political institutions, including the FBI and the Mueller probe. As the experience of countless other countries, from Russia to Turkey, shows, attacks on the rule of law often start with the politically motivated purge of comparatively minor figures whose record is not entirely clean. Once institutions that are supposed to be independent from the head of state become accustomed to yielding to political pressure, the demands keep ratcheting up. Before long, any critics of the government know that they are unlikely to receive the same treatment as other citizens. We are still far from that dystopia. But despite Strzok’s undoubted failings, the highly irregular manner of his firing is another early link along the chain that leads from the rule of law to what the Founding Fathers rightly deplored as “the rule of men.”
More Woodward & Bernstein perspectives
This pair has quite a history, & now they’re onto something that will likely turn out even bigger than Watergate! These interesting historical insights are posted here from woodward-bernstein-waterg
Carl Bernstein received an email from Bob Woodward the other day. “Can you believe this?” it read, “44 years!” It was a reference to President Richard Nixon’s resignation on 8 August 1974, following years of dogged reporting by the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein into the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The most famous double act in journalism were in their early 30s at the time and, like the Beatles when they broke up, could have been forgiven for assuming that the biggest story of their career was behind them. But then along came Donald Trump with Watergate echoes too loud to ignore. “Woodstein”, as the affectionate compound noun has them, are elder statesmen now but the hunger is still there.
Woodward’s upcoming book, Fear: Trump in the White House, shot to number one on Amazon.com within a day of its announcement. It is expected to be the most authoritative account yet of the first 18 months of the administration. Bernstein was among three CNN reporters who recently broke the story of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s allegation that the Republican candidate knew in advance of the June 2016 meeting between his son, Don Jr, and Russian representatives. Bernstein is clearly galvanised by covering a big story again but there is no hint of glee. “I would hardly call covering Trump a joyous experience,” he told the Guardian. “I think that this is a dangerous time for America, that we have a president with no regard for the rule of law or for the truth. I say those things not pejoratively. It’s reportorially established and I think that’s what’s so extraordinary.”
Some parallels with Watergate are inescapable, he said. “Obviously there are similarities, not least of which is part of the story is about undermining the electoral process. You’re also dealing with cover-ups in both instances and special prosecutors.” But the differences from that era appear more profound to him. Bernstein explained: “This is worse than Watergate in the sense that the system worked in Watergate and it’s not apparent yet that the system is working in the current situation. No president has done anything like Trump to characterise the American press and its exercise of the first amendment as the enemy of the people, a phrase associated with the greatest despots of the 20th century.” Currently writing a memoir of growing up in the newspaper business from age 16 to 21, Bernstein has seen many presidents come and go but Trump is “sui generis”, he believes. “One might have thought that Richard Nixon was but they’re very different. Even using the word demagogue and saying that the president of the United States is a habitual liar, one would not have said that about Nixon. He lied often to hide his criminality but what sounds pejorative when I’m on the air is reportorially about him being a habitual liar, about what demagoguery is.”
Woodward, 75, and Bernstein, 74, never stopped reporting or writing. Bernstein is a political commentator for CNN whose books include A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Woodward has worked at the Post for nearly half a century and is now associate editor. He has written several bestselling chronicles of presidencies from Nixon to Barack Obama. Fear: Trump in the White House, out next month, is his 19th book and one of most eagerly awaited. Publisher Simon & Schuster teases that it will show the “harrowing life” of the Trump administration, drawing upon “hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, contemporaneous meeting notes, files, documents and personal diaries”. The title is based on a remark that Trump made to Woodward and another Post reporter in a 2016 interview: “Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.”
More Definitive Signs Trump is a Jerk
While staging a splashy half-hour production of a $717 billion defense bill named after John McCain, in true jerkdom tradition Trump avoided even mentioning McCain’s name: trump-talks-for-28-minut
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