Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "ABC News"
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Dr. Anthony Fauci was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in1984. He oversees an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria as well as emerging diseases such as Ebola and Zika. NIAID also supports research on transplantation and immune-related illnesses, including autoimmune disorders, asthma and allergies.
Dr. Fauci has advised six Presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues. He was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program that has saved millions of lives throughout the developing world.
Dr. Fauci also is the longtime chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response.
Dr. Fauci is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has been awarded 38 honorary doctoral degrees and is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,200 scientific publications, including several major textbooks.
In a 2019 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 41st most highly cited researcher of ALL TIME. According to the Web of Science, he ranked 8th out of more than 2.2 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2019.
And Trump thinks he knows more about viruses and infectious diseases than this guy, simply because he had an Uncle who attended MIT. Let that sink in for a moment.
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The true character of an individual will always be revealed when they are faced with a crisis or adversity. And the eternal question will always be: at the moment of truth, when it truly mattered, what did they do? How did they respond?
In the midst of a national health crisis, when America needed a leader the most, Trump has categorically failed. He failed at the moment of truth. It has been a catastrophic failure, with lethal consequences. His lies, indifference, and downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic, will be remembered as the greatest dereliction of duty in presidential history. It is why this virus will be remembered by historians as The TrumpVirus, and rightfully so, because it didn't have to be this way. The needless loss of more than 200 thousand American lives is now Trump's legacy.
We owe it to the more than 220 thousand American souls that are no longer with us, to remove Trump from office.
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Trump: "Today, I am officially terminating my relationship with reality. I don't like the way reality has treated me. It's been very unfair....so tremendously unfair."
Trump Jan. 24, Twitter:.
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Trump Feb. 7, Twitter:
“Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!
Trump Feb. 7, Remarks before Marine One departure:
"Late last night, I had a very good talk with President Xi, and we talked about — mostly about the coronavirus. They're working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job. They're in touch with World — the World — World Organization. CDC also. We're working together. But World Health is working with them. CDC is working with them. I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”
Trump Feb. 10, Fox interview:.
"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard."
Trump Feb. 10, rally in Manchester, N.H.:
“I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”
Trump Feb. 23, before boarding Marine One:
"I think President Xi is working very, very hard. I spoke to him. He's working very hard. I think he's doing a very good job. It's a big problem. But President Xi loves his country. He's working very hard to solve the problem, and he will solve the problem. OK?"
Trump Feb. 27, press conference:
“I spoke with President Xi. We had a great talk. He’s working very hard, I have to say. He’s working very, very hard. And if you can count on the reports coming out of China, that spread has gone down quite a bit. The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.”
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"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million.
Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway.
In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels.
A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
Congress is furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress is rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon.
It was revealed that the Trump gave approval for companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place.
House Democrats began investigating the administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced in February it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.
lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violates the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations.
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Lindsey Graham is lying through his teeth.
Dems NEVER wanted a ridiculous wall. Dems have voted to increase funding for border security. Obama increased the funding for border security, and he increased the size of the Border Patrol. Now Dems are offering more money for improvements in border security, like surveillance, cameras, drones, sensors, barriers, and certain sections of walls. These are all practical and sensible improvements, that have proven to work. But Dems will NEVER provide funding for Trump's ridiculous wall.
Sorry Traitor Trump, but the American people will not pay for a lie you told during the campaign. Trump actually wants the American people to bail him out by paying for his ridiculous wall. I still remember reading the transcript of the phone conversation Trump had with the President of Mexico. Trump was literally begging him to do him a big favor, and announce to the media that Mexico would pay for the wall.😂😂. The president of Mexico laughed, and basically said "no way José." 😂😂😂
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In Trump's diseased mind, he actually believes that thousands of Americans are willing, EVEN HAPPY, to go without pay for months, or even years, JUST FOR HIM. Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was right when he said that Trump is a terrible human being.
Trump quote from 2004, a response to a Larry King Live caller asking how he handles stress. Trump: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter."
Spoken like a true sociopath. Trump meets pretty much every diagnostic criterion of a sociopath.
• Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
• Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities.
• Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
• Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
● Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
• Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
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Hannity: "What are your top priority items if you were to get a 2nd term?"
Trump: "That's a tremendously great and powerfully strong question Sean. Well, as you know, I still have high hopes of getting a deal for that tower in Moscow that I've always dreamed of. I'm also going to work on getting rid of that stupid emoluments clause in the Constitution. You have no idea how hard it is for me and my family to grift with that emoluments clause aways getting in the way. And of course I plan on golfing a lot more. I barely got a chance to do any golfing during my 1st term. Can you believe it? And last but not least, I am determined to lockup any and everyone who has ever mocked me, or made me feel inadequate, impotent, and insecure, like Hillary, Obama, Melania, Stormy Daniels, and umbrellas."
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Trump and his grifter family are running their criminal enterprise out of the white. That's what the entire Trump administration has been about since the very beginning. It's why Jared and Ivanka were brought into the white house. They aren't working for the country, or the American people, they are working for themselves. They are working to enrich themselves even more. Every move they make is a calculated business move for their own financial gains.
It's not an accident that Trump has been hostile towards America's longtime traditional allies, like Canada, Australia, The UK, and France. It's because financially, those countries don't really have anything to offer Trump and his criminal organization. And it's not an accident that Trump has been so cozy with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. Even before he became president, he benefited financially from Saudi, China, and Russia. Many of Trump's products are manufactured in China, and Ivanka has received more than 20 new trademark deals in China since Trump became president. Saudi Arabia bought an entire floor in Trump's Tower, and Saudis have been spending a fortune at Trump's new Hotel in DC. And we already know that Russians and Saudis, both bailed out Trump when he was going bankrupt in the 90s. If it were not for the Saudis and Russians, Trump would not have survived the 90s. What Trump and his family are doing, amounts to nothing more than a smash & grab. All anyone has to do is take a step back and open your eyes, and you'll see that what Trump and his family are doing is happening right in front of our faces.
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On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”
Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the “Molotov cocktail” was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia.
It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when American banks stopped loaning Trump it money. It was a win-win for both sides. The Russian mafia is totally different than the American mafia. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. In an interviewed, Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Putin’s boss at one point, was asked about the Russain mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”
Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.
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Trump: "So here's the good news: The virus is a hoax, this will all disappear like magic, this virus is no different than the flu, I'm doing a great job, my uncle went to MIT, and we're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. I'm going to open up the country soon. We have this under control. My authority is total."
COVID-19: "So here's the bad news. I am immune to Trump's lies and gaslighting. Ignorance, lies, and misinformation from Trump and Fox only makes me stronger. I can't be defeated with phony patriotism, guns, or flag waving. I can't be defeated with magic, because I am real, and magic is not. I can only be defeated with science, facts, unselfishness, and common sense. I am nothing like the flu, but the flu is a fan of mine, and it wants to be like me when it grows up. I can't be defeated with thoughts and prayers, so going to places of worship won't save you. Currently there is no cure for me, and that's the problem. I singlehandedly shutdown MIT. I recognize no one's authority. Selfish ignorant people like Trump and his cult are the wind beneath my wings, they give me life. I've had success in other countries, but America is making me great again."
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"Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended, by political parties and organized citizens but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.
This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence) and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy, gradually, subtly, and even legally, eliminate it.
Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one."
How Democracies Die --by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you, would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
This is the state of the Republican party today.
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In 2015, Western European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Donald Trump’s orbit. In April 2016, one of the Baltic states shared with then–CIA director John Brennan an audio recording of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief Brennan on intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The contents of these communications have not been disclosed, but what Brennan learned obviously unsettled him profoundly. In congressional testimony on Russian election interference last year, Brennan hinted that some Americans might have betrayed their country. “Individuals who go along a treasonous path,” he warned, “do not even realize they’re along that path until it gets to be a bit too late.” In an interview this year, he put it more bluntly: “I think [Trump] is afraid of the president of Russia. The Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.”
In July 2016, a loose-knit community of computer scientists and cybersecurity experts discovered a strange pattern of online traffic between two computer servers. One of those servers belonged to Alfa Bank in Moscow and the other to the Trump Organization. Alfa Bank’s owners had “assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation,” as a federal court once put it.
The analysts noted that the traffic between the two servers occurred during office hours in New York and Moscow and spiked in correspondence with major campaign events, suggesting it entailed human communication rather than bots. More suspiciously, after New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau asked Alfa Bank about it but before he brought it up with the Trump campaign, the server in Trump Tower shut down. The timing strongly implied Alfa Bank was communicating with Trump..
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Trump Dec 7, 2019:
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water. We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where it rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. You can’t wash your hands practically, there’s so little water comes out of the faucet” and then you “end up using the same amount of water.”
😂😄😂😅
On Dec 23, at turning point USA, Trump gave what could be considered his most stupefying soliloquy to date.
“I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. (Don Quixote disagrees) I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right?"
--Trump
Just let all of that sink in for a moment. Trump really enjoys giving the world little peeks inside of his diseased riddled mind. I dare any Trump cultist to try and explain to me exactly what it was Trump was trying to say, or what salient point he was trying to make. I dare you...
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In April 2018, a federal judge finalized the $25 million settlement between Trump and students of his now defunct fake Trump University with New York's attorney general claiming “victims of Donald Trump’s fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve.”
The order from a U.S. District Judge came a year after he first approved the settlement. It marks the end of two class-action lawsuits and a civil lawsuit from NY accusing Trump of "swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars through Trump University," in the words of NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
"This settlement marked a stunning reversal by President Trump, who for years refused to compensate the victims of his sham university," Schneiderman said in a statement.
Trump University was not an actual university but a for-profit seminar scam, and former students waged a years-long battle claiming the course misled them with claims of teaching real estate success. The program ended in 2010. Some elderly plaintiffs who paid $20,000-plus in tuition died waiting to receive their checks from the settlement.
November of last year, Trump was ordered by a judge to pay $2 million in damages for illegally using funds intended for charity to boost his 2016 presidential election campaign.
Trump had to admit to personally misusing charity money, according to the New York’s attorney general office, despite having previously denied any wrongdoing. The fine adds to several other investigations into allegations that he is using public office for self-enrichment..
The lawsuit last year states that Trump, and his three money grubbing useless children - Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric - broke campaign finance laws in 2016 by using Trump Foundation’s tax-exempt status “as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests.
Trump and his crime family had violated their fiduciary duties as officers and directors of the now-shuttered Trump Foundation. As a result of that failure, charitable dollars — consistently and over many years — often benefited Trump rather than the causes he repeatedly claimed he supports.
There was “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation – including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” the suit claimed.
In the agreements, Trump admitted to misusing funds from the foundation, which he dissolved last year, including to pay for a portrait himself that cost $10,000. He also agreed to pay back $11,525 he spent on sports memorabilia and champagne at a charity gala.
Trump also directed the foundation to use money for charity to buy a Tim Tebow helmet for himself, and to settle a couple of lawsuits.
Trump also admitted in the agreements to directing that $100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over an 80-foot flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort, instead of paying the expense out of his own pocket..
The biggest donation that Trump’s fake foundation ever gave appears to have been to contribute $264,632 to fixing a fountain outside of the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time. “It shows you what this "foundation" was all about. Which was basically all about advancing Trump’s interests,” said Brian Galle, a professor of tax law at Georgetown University.
In addition, Trump used his charity foundation to pay-off a $158,000 lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course, and $5,000 for ads promoting Trump’s hotels in the programs for charitable events. Trump admitted these transactions were also improper.
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When Trump says he's concerned about corruption, he means that he's deeply concerned about going to prison for his own corruption. Trump didn't drain the swamp, he pardoned it.
Trump wants to create a world where nothing is wrong, and nothing is illegal anymore. It's the type of world that he's been dreaming of his entire life. A criminal's paradise. The Trump name will forever be synonymous with corruption.
Back when Trump was still pretending that he knew how to run a casino in Atlantic City--back when he still had the people of Atlantic City fooled that he was a legit business man, he
became friends with a man named Joseph Weichselbaum, an embezzler, mob associate, cocaine trafficker, and a thrice-convicted felon..
Trump hired Weichselbaum, who was a helicopter pilot, to fly in casino high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum, to whom he also entrusted maintenance of "The Ivana," Trump’s personal helicopter. Weichselbaum—at that point a twice-convicted felon—personally piloted the Trumps in that copter.
Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia and shipping them from Bradford Motors, a Miami-area car dealership he partly owned, to Cincinnati. Because Weichselbaum was then a twice-convicted felon, NJ gambling regulators insisted to Trump that he not be involved with providing helicopter services to the Trump casinos. Yet Weichselbaum continued collecting a $100,000 salary from the helicopter company, and Trump kept using the company that paid Weichselbaum.
In his indictment and confession, it was revealed that Weichselbaum’s more lucrative business was having drugs delivered to Bradford Motors, the Miami-area car dealership he had an ownership stake in. In his testimony, Weichselbaum admitted to helping to load up to 1,500 pounds of drugs at the time into cars, that mules then drove to the Cincinnati area for distribution in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
NJ Casino Control Commission records show that Trump learned of the indictment in October of 1985. At that point, any decent person would have cut off all ties to Weichselbaum, because failing to do so could cost him his casino license. But of course as we all know, Trump is anything but a decent person. Instead, Trump became even closer to the drug trafficker.
Two months after the indictment, Trump rented apartment 32C in the Trump Plaza Apartments on E. 61st St. in Manhattan to the Weichselbaum brothers, according to NJ Casino Control Commission records. Trump personally owned the unit. Then Trump wrote a letter to the District Court on Trump Organization stationery pleading for mercy for his drug trafficking friend. He called him “a credit to the community.” Trump also described the drug trafficker as “conscientious, forthright and diligent,” 😲
When NJ gaming regulators first asked Trump about this letter, he denied writing it.😂 When they came back with a copy of the letter, Trump said under oath that his signature was on the page.😂 However, Trump’s letter must have worked. Weichselbaum served just 18 months, while the people who merely drove the drugs to Ohio got sentences of up to 20 years.
During his parole, Weichselbaum was required to inform authorities that he had a job and a place to live. He told authorities he would be working for Trump again as Trump's helicopter guy once released. Weichselbaum then moved into Trump Tower.
Just another example of the type of people that Trump associates himself with. Only the best people.😉
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I'm sure we all remember the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil incident in the Gulf of Mexico. I still remember watching the 24hr live video stream of thousands of gallons of oil being dumped into the gulf. Well days before the Trump administration unveiled its plans for a massive expansion of offshore drilling, it moved to gut the Production Safety Systems Rule, a set of safety regulations the Obama administration created pertaining to maintenance of offshore platforms. The changes, finalized last month and slated to take effect on Dec. 27, loosen notification and certification rules for oil companies and toss out a requirement that offshore equipment be designed to withstand the most extreme weather and pressure conditions.
In May, Trump took aim at the Well Control Rule, a safety monitoring regulation meant to prevent the kind of Deepwater Horizon incident that killed 11 workers and resulted in some 200 million gallons of crude oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. The rule requires additional inspection and maintenance of blowout preventers, a device designed to automatically seal a well, and stop an uncontrolled release of oil and gas. Stripping the Obama era regulations would loosen the inspection and oversight requirements for this equipment.
Trump's reckless, irresponsible, and controversial drilling plan called “energy dominance” would make available for oil and gas leasing, roughly 90 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, including large swaths of the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Interior Department, led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, who's currently under multiple ethics investigations is leading the charge for Trump's plan.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement estimates that rolling back these safety regulations would save oil companies just shy of $1 billion over a 10-year period. I mean sure, it could lead to another Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. It could result in the loss of lives again. It could cost fishermen their entire livelihoods again. But who cares, just as long as billion dollar oil companies can save millions of dollars, that's on top of the millions they're already saving from the massive tax cuts Trump gifted them. Now that's what I call MAGA!!! 😔
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In 1994, a Democrat led Congress passed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act — commonly called the assault weapons ban.
It prohibited the manufacture or sale for civilian use of certain semi-automatic weapons. The act also banned magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more.
In 2004, the Republican led Congress refused to renew the 10 year assault weapons ban after it expired.
Before the 1994 ban:
From 1981 – the earliest year in our analysis – to the rollout of the assault weapons ban in 1994, the proportion of deaths in mass shootings in which an assault rifle was used was lower than it is today.
Yet in this earlier period, mass shooting deaths were steadily rising. Indeed, high-profile mass shootings involving assault rifles – such as the ki//ing of five children in Stockton, California, in 1989 and a 1993 San Francisco office attack that left eight victimsDead – provided the impetus behind a push for a prohibition on some types of gun.
During the 1994-2004 ban:
In the years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Even including 1999’s Columbine High School massacre – the deadliest MassShooting during the period of the ban – the 1994 to 2004 period saw lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and deaths resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.
From 2004 onward:
The data shows an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.
Breaking the data into absolute numbers, between 2004 and 2017 – the last year of our analysis – the average number of yearly deaths attributed to mass shootings was 25, compared with 5.3 during the 10-year tenure of the ban and 7.2 in the years leading up to the prohibition on assault weapons.
Saving hundreds of lives
We calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70% lower during the period in which the assault weapons ban was active. The proportion of overall gun homicides resulting from mass shootings was also down, with nine fewer mass-shooting-related fatalities per 10,000 shooting deaths.
Taking population trends into account, a model we created based on this data suggests that had the federal assault weapons ban been in place throughout the whole period of our study – that is, from 1981 through 2017 – it may have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the years in which there was no ban.
Michael J. Klein, New York University
The Conversation
Published: June 8, 2022
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In the video of a December 2015 dinner celebrating the 10th birthday of Putin's propaganda network RT at a Moscow hotel, Putin and a host of Russian luminaries toasted the state-controlled news channel that U.S. intelligence calls a Kremlin mouthpiece. And next to Putin at the head table, in the seat of honor, was Michael Flynn, who would later become Trump's national security adviser, was already advising Trump's campaign when he was being paid $45,000 to speak at the gala.
"It is not coincidence that Flynn was placed next to President Putin," said Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador in Moscow "Flynn was considered a close Trump adviser. Why else would they want him there?"
Flynn's Moscow jaunt, like his oddly timed phone chats with the Russian ambassador, has been well reported. The video shows that the Dec. 10, 2015 dinner, was attended by a healthy serving of ex-russian spies, Putin's cronies and oligarchs.
Sergey Ivanov, then Putin's chief of staff, sat directly across the table from Flynn. A former KGB general who at one point ran KGB operations in Africa, he has also served as Russian defense minister and deputy prime minister. Ivanov had been under U.S. and European sanctions for a year and a half by the date of the dinner.
Next to Ivanov was Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, but more importantly his de facto national security adviser, say U.S. officials. Flanking Putin on his right, two seats from Flynn, sat Alexey Gromov, Putin's deputy chief of staff. U.S. intelligence considers Gromov to be Putin's head propagandist. According to the January 6 Intelligence Community report on Russian interference in the U.S. election. He too was on U.S. and European sanctions the day of the dinner.
After Putin got up to make his speech, his place at Flynn's side was taken by Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief. A personal friend of Putin, she worked in one of his presidential campaigns before being chosen by Gromov to head RT. U.S. intelligence assessment of RT paints Simonyan as the lead person, along with Gromov, engaging in information warfare against U.S. policies. She is described as closely tied to, controlled by the Kremlin.
Beyond the head table, Russia's oligarchs filled many of the seats. Like Viktor Vekselberg, whose billions are in oil and aluminum and who is a business partner of Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the owner of the world's largest collection of Faberge eggs.
Flynn had already been a frequent guest on RT in the months prior to the dinner. When Putin finished his speech that night, Flynn was among the first to leap to his feet and offer a standing ovation.
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Trump’s business interest in communist China is long-standing. He began applying for trademarks there in 2005, and in 2012, the Trump Hotel Collection opened an office in Shanghai, its first in Asia.
Two of the Trump Organization’s foreign partners — developers in Dubai and Indonesia, each building residential complexes that include a Trump golf course — have announced new partnerships with state-run Chinese companies. On June 10 2018, Dubai’s Damac Properties announced that the state-run China State Construction Engineering Corp. had been awarded a contract to build roads and infrastructure at the new Akoya Oxygen. Trump will be paid to operate a golf course there, his second in the area, and paid for the use of his name.
In May 2018, Trump’s partner in Indonesia — MNC Corp. — announced that it had signed a construction contract with another state-run Chinese company, the Metallurgical Corporation of China, for its planned Lido City development. Plans for that project, in a mountainous area of West Java, include a Trump-branded golf resort.
The communist Chinese government granted a total of 41 trademarks to Ivanka by April of 2019. These are trademarks she applied for after her father became president, and the got approved for about 40% faster than those she requested before Trump’s victory in the 2016 election according to Forbes.
On March 29, 2017, Ivanka became an official government employee, joining Jared as an adviser to her father in the White House. The day before that appointment, Ivanka applied for 17 new trademarks with the communist Chinese government.
Over a span of two months in late 2018, the communist Chinese government granted 18 trademarks to companies linked to Trump and his daughter. In October alone, China’s Trademark Office granted provisional approval for 16 trademarks to Ivanka Trump Marks LLC. The new approvals covered Ivanka-branded fashion gear, including sunglasses, handbags, shoes and jewelry, as well as beauty services and voting machines. In January of 2019, China granted Ivanka’s company preliminary approval for another five trademarks covering wedding dresses, and art valuation services. The applications were filed in 2016 and 2017.
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Putin's asset in the Oval Office STILL hasn't uttered one word about the bounties that Putin has placed on the heads of our troops in Afghanistan.
Last week we learned that a violent collision took place in Syria between US and Russian troops that left American troops with concussions, two U.S. officials said.
The official said two Russian helicopters flew above the Americans, and one of the aircraft was within about 70 feet the vehicle.
The injuries occurred when one of the Russian vehicles deliberately sideswiped an American vehicle in a convoy, causing the crew to suffer "concussion-like injuries." Initial reports indicate as many as four Americans may have been injured.
Naturally Traitor Trump will accuse our troops of refusing to yield to his Russian comrades.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
―President Theodore Roosevelt
As a veteran, the oath I took would never allow me to vote for a domestic threat to my country like Trump. Trump has repeatedly betrayed America, it's people, as well as his oath of office. And as a Marine veteran, his betrayals to this country are unforgettable, and unforgivable.
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In her new book, Trump's niece says Trump was scarred by his father and developed habits of lying and self-deception that shadowed him into the White House.
"This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism," Mary Trump writes in her book. "Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be," she writes.
"In Donald's mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero – being good – is impossible for him," she writes in the book.
Mary Trump, a 55-year-old psychologist, blames Trump's father for giving Donald his bad habits. Fred Trump Sr was a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – demanding Trump to follow less-than-scrupulous real estate practices and eventually propping him up if his own initiatives failed.
"When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son's brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested," Mary Trump writes. "His monster had been set free."
"The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor," she said. "Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it's people weaker than he is who are keeping him there."
Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mitch McConnell, "all whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred," recognized after the election that Donald Trump's personal history and personality flaws made him vulnerable to manipulation, Mary Trump writes.
"His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he's the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it's imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that's contributed to the United States' rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy."
Trump's initial response to the coronavirus "underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs," Mary Trump writes.
"Fear – the equivalent of weakness in our family – is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old," she said.
She points to Gov. Cuomo's response to his state's outbreak of COVID-19 cases as an example of "real leadership," further revealing the president as a "petty, pathetic little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost to his own delusional spin."
At the end, Mary Trump writes "Donald isn't really the problem after all" – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment.
"This is the end result of Donald's having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings," she writes.
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In the late 80s and early 90s as a District Attorney in Cali, Adam Schiff successfully prosecuted the case of a Russian spy named Svetlana Ogorodonikov, and an FBI agent named Richard W. Miller, who was seduced by Svetlana Ogorodnikov, and agreed to sell classified information to the Soviet government. Eventually, this man—Richard W. Miller, a 47-year-old Los Angeles-based counterintelligence agent on the Bureau’s Soviet squad—would become the first FBI agent ever convicted of espionage.
and eventually agreed turnover highly classified information for larges sums of money. It took Schiff 3 trails, and 6 years, but he eventually won the conviction against them, and they were both sent to prison.
During that long 6 years, Schiff stated that learned a lot about Russian tradecraft: how the Russians operate, who they target, the vulnerabilities they look for. During his work on the case, Schiff was also in frequent contact with FBI agents investigating Miller—giving the future congressman an intimate look at, and respect for, the Bureau’s counterintelligence mission.
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Putin, Kim Jong Un, Duterte, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, MBS, Xi Jinping, and Al-Assad all have one thing in common. They are all brutal strongmen and dictators who demand respect, loyalty, and dogmatic obedience to them and them alone. This is exactly why Trump has a sick and demented admiration for these tyrants. He sees himself as one of them.
Time and time again, Trump keeps telling us exactly who and what he is. But unfortunately some people still refuse to believe him, or even listen to what he's saying.
June 15 2018
Trump praises Kim Jung Un's control over his people.
"He's the head of the country," Trump said of Kim during a Fox interview.
"And I mean he's the strong head. Don't let anyone think anything different."
"He speaks and his people sit up at attention," Trump added. "I want my people to do the same."
Deep down, Trump has always despised America and our democratic republic. He has nothing but contempt for our Constitution, and the " idea" of America. Trump has always favored despotic dictatorships. That's why he speaks so highly of tyrants like Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi, Duterte, and MBS. And anyone who has been paying attention, knows that Trump has never hidden his true feelings about any of this. When someone repeatedly tells you, and shows you who they are, it would behoove you to believe them.
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Here is what a swamp looks like folks.
Whitaker was waiting off-set at CNN in June 2017 when he and another guest struck up a conversation. The two men, both former Justice Department officials, talked about work and family. The fellow guest, St. John’s University law professor John Q. Barrett, recalls asking Whitaker what had prompted him to go on television to discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election meddling.
“I hope this will help me get noticed,” Barrett recalled Whitaker telling him. In comments around that time, Whitaker said Mueller’s probe had gone too far, and on one CNN appearance he suggested that cutting funding to the investigation could hobble Mueller. Barrett, in an interview and in remarks on Twitter, recalled Whitaker saying that he hoped his appearances would generate attention so that the President Trump would appoint him a federal judge in his home state of Iowa.
Whitaker is definitely a compromised Trump stooge, who has absolutely zero intentions of upholding the law with integrity. He does however have every intention of helping Trump obstruct justice.
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Trump said it was one person coming from China. He literally said that. He should be dragged out of the White House for that comment alone.
Trump Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Trump March 7: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.”
Trump's indifference, sincere ignorance, and conscientious stupidity, are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. And no amountof lies, spin, or deflections will ever change that.
U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout Dec, Jan, and Feb for the National Security Council, and the White House..
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield.
Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those briefings is anyone's guess. But the safe bet would be that he did not bother to read them at all. Which makes his failure even more unconscionable.
It's clear that Trump's indifference and inaction, constitutes a criminal dereliction of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. Amercan lives have been needlessly lost as a direct consequence of his moral ineptitude and sociopathic behavior, and for that, he must be held accountable..
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Thousands of Americans have needlessly died due to Trump's indifference, selfishness, criminal negligence, and his commitment to willful ignorance. And no amount of lies, deflections, spin, or gaslighting will ever change that.
Trump's administration tried to bury a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places. The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day." Once again Trump is dismissive of scientific facts because they get in the way of the lies and misinformation he's been spreading since the beginning of the pandemic. Instead of sharing this vital information which can literally save lives, he hides it.
Trump's cult has bought into his commitment to willful ignorance. Trump feeds them lies and misinformation on a daily basis, and they accept it without questioning the validity of anything he says. And at the same time, they will say that they are protesting for their "freedom." What they don't realize is that no man or woman can ever truly be free without factual information....without the truth. Without the facts and the truth, they are nothing more than tools for the person feeding them lies.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
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Trump: "I'm not taking responsibility for any of this. People are acting like I'm a REAL president and a real leader. I'm the same guy who betrayed America in front of the entire world in Helsinki. I'm nothing more than a fraud, who with the help of Putin, managed to con my way into the Oval Office. Plus most people knew I was fundamentally unfit intellectually, morally, temperamentally, emotionally, and psychologically to be president. Someone as mentally unstable and divorced from reality as I clearly am, should have NEVER been allowed anywhere near the White House.
So again, don't blame me, blame the people who were dumb enough to vote for me. Blame republicans in Congress who aided, abetted, and pardoned my crimes. Blame people like Lindsey Graham and Moscow Mitch. They both know exactly who and what I am, but yet they continue to defend me. For crying out loud, Lindsey Graham even stated on fox, that I was in fact, a Krazy, race-baiting bigot. So you see, I'm the same person that I've always been, an irredeemable con-man and a sociopath, but you already knew that."
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President Obama created the NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense, and he passed it on to Trump in 2017. And then Trump dismantled it, because he doesn't believe in science or facts, so he didn't understand it..
“I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes said before pointing to a National Security Council (NSC) pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump administration in 2018..
And what we did is set up, in the White House, ... an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump..
And when you don’t have an office like that, you don’t have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted upon. When you see an outbreak in a place like Wuhan, China, you want people in the White House who are thinking about what needs to be done right away so that you don’t get behind the curve, which is what happened in this White House.
You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,”
--Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama.
Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of disbelief. Experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House, charged with preparing for WHEN, NOT if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
Recently President Obama held a virtual meeting with mayors and local leaders across America. In that meeting, Obama advised them on the BIGGEST MISTAKE any leader could make during a crisis such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“The biggest mistake any of us can make in these situations is to misinform, particularly when we’re requiring people to make sacrifices and take actions that might not be their natural inclination. leaders in a crisis have to give the people the truth. Speak the truth. Speak it clearly. Speak it with compassion. Speak it with empathy for what folks are going through. The more smart people you have around you, and the less embarrassed you are to ask questions, the better your response is going to be."
-- President Barack Obama
But that's not what we got at all during this national health crisis. What we got instead, was Trump, who makes it his mission, to go on TV and lie to the American people every single day. And that's exactly what he's been doing, since day one.
According to Trump, he doesn't have to be intellectually curious, or informed, he just has to be loud, boisterous, and assertive. It also helps if you can lie with confidence. You have to be able to overwhelm the masses with so many lies, that by the time they've debunked just one of your lies, you've already told 20 more new lies.
Meanwhile, Trump's is continuing his mission of gaslighting to oblivion, the feeble and atrophied minds of his cultists, with lies about how great of a job he's doing.
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As a Marine veteran, my heart goes out to you doctors and nurses on the front lines of this virus. America will forever owe you all a debt of gratitude. There's no shame in having a breakdown due to fear or exhaustion. The only shame is in not getting up from it, and letting it control you. Hold the line!!!
Semper Fi..
"If you're going through he//, keep going."
--Winston Churchill
During any emergency or crisis, you will find that some people will rise to the occasion, people like many of our Governors, and especially the nurses and doctors who have been on the front lines of this crisis since day one. And unfortunately, you will have some people like Trump, who will categorically fail during a crisis. They will not rise to the occasion. Instead they will fail at the moment of truth. Not only will they fail, but like Trump, they will seek to blame others for their failures.
In the end, the true character of a person will always be revealed when they are faced with adversity. And the eternal question will always be, what did they do when it truly mattered?
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis
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Why anyone would choose to listen to Trump instead of medical experts is beyond me. Call me Krazy, but if I want to know how to effectively deal with a pandemic outbreak, I'm calling Dr. Fauci and other medical experts. If I want to know how to bankrupt multiple casinos, or set up a fake university and charity foundation, or lie like it's my job, or launder money with the Russians, then I'm calling Trump, and nobody but Trump...
Trump supporters who would rather listen to Trump instead of medical experts, should not be allowed to receive any medical treatment from doctors or nurses of any kind. If they need a surgical operation, SORRY, they'll have to call the White House and request an appointment with Trump to perform it. If they're about to give birth, SORRY, they have to call the White House and request an appointment with Trump to deliver their child. And If their child gets sick, SORRY, Trump will now be the baby's new pediatrician. If they need a root canal, SORRY, Trump will perform it in the Oval Office. If they need a new pair of prescription glasses, SORRY, Trump will perform their eye examinations from now on. If they've been in an accident, and are seriously injured, SO SORRY, you can no longer be rushed to the E.R. they have to be rushed to the Oval Office where Trump will attend to their injuries.
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Trump should just stop talking all together, because he doesn't help, he only hurts, and has never solved a single problem in his entire life. He doesn't solve problems, he only creates problems, or he exacerbates them. Trump himself is a systemic problem for the country, on multiple levels. He portrayed the pandemic as a hoax, and believes he knows more than medical experts in their own fields. To put it mildly, he is a walking talking, living breathing fk up.
Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” —CNBC interview..
Jan. 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment— 5 — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us, that I can assure you.” —Trump speech in Michigan.
Feb. 26: “So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” — Trump White House briefing.
Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump press conference.
Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting.
March 4: “We have a very small number of people in this country infected. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people from a cruise ship. We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” — Trump White House meeting.
This is what you get when you have an illegitimate president who doesn't believe in facts or science, but instead immerses himself in buffoonery like magic and sorcery.
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Today Trump openly admitted that he wants to dominate over the American people. This is the dictator that most of us knew was waiting to show itself since the day Trump was sworn in.
“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
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NEVER FORGET, Last year during a July ceremony in the Rose Garden to formally sign a bill that will extend the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund through 2092, Trump told a group of more than 60 first responders an outrageous lie when he said "Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there—I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
Trump has told outrageous lies about helping first responders on 9/11 in the past. On the campaign trail on April 18, 2016, in Buffalo NY, he said: " Everyone who helped clear the rubble - and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit."😲
There is no evidence that Trump participated in recovery efforts, there’s also no evidence he spent any time near ground zero in the week following the attack.
NEVER FORGET, that on 9/11, just hours after the towers fell, Trump bragged to local TV station WWOR, that his building 40 Wall Steet, was now the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. On a day of such unimaginable loss and tragedy, Trump seemed to be more focused on the bragging rights of now having the tallest building in Manhattan. In his diseased narcissistic mind, that day was all about him But in true Trump fashion, his boast about having the tallest building in Manhattan after the towers fell was a big lie. The nearby 70 Pine Street building is 25 ft, taller than Trump's.
Trump also lied about losing 100 friends on 9/11. To this day, he has not been able to name one friend he lost on 9/11.
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"The buck stops with me."
-- President Biden, 08/20/2021
As president, Biden took responsibility for the chaos of the Afghan withdrawal.
'No, I don't take responsibility at all'."
--Trump 03/13/2020
Trump deflects blame for his coronavirus testing debacle, and the soaring number of infections.
Personally, I like presidents who don't dodge drafts or responsibility.
Why would anyone think that cleaning up a 20 year debacle would be easy or pretty? Especially in a country like Afghanistan, and especially after the deal that Trump made.
Name one thing about Afghanistan that has ever been easy, pretty, or smooth.
So far, the US and it's partners have evacuated about 105,000 people since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban entered Kabul. That's an outstanding number considering the chaotic situation on the ground there.
Keep it up President Biden.👍👍
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The true character of a person will always be revealed when they are faced with a crisis or adversity. And the eternal question will always be, when it truly mattered, did they do the right thing? So far, Trump has failed. And Trump has never failed to fail, because failing has always been the easiest thing for him to do.
When this is finally over, there will be an independent commission tasked with investigating and producing a full and complete accounting of the nation’s preparedness and response to the coronavirus. Donald "I believe in magic not science" Trump, will be held accountable for his indifference, criminal ineptitude, and his failure as president to properly protect and defend this country from a pandemic that has already cost more than 8 thousand American lives. And many of these Americans did not have to die.
When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014, President Obama recognized that responding to the outbreak overseas, while also protecting Americans at home, involved multiple U.S. government departments and agencies, none of which were speaking to one another.
So to bring order and harmony to the chaos, he create a coherent multiagency response overseas and on the homefront. Building on the Ebola experience, President Obama set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council, and another in the Department of Homeland Security—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC, and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
But that’s all gone now. In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down. This was the directorate charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics. Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of shock. Because experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
In the spring of 2018, Trump pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated..
America would never survive another four years of Trump, and his criminally incompetent administration. Unfortunately, many Americans did not, and will not survive the first 3 years of his administration. May they rest in peace...
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The evidence against Trump is clear.
Lt.Col Vindman twice told a superior of his concerns about Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine for the investigation in exchange for military aid, the White House lawyer John Eisenberg had the full transcript of Trump's phone call moved to the highly classified White House server, which is usually reserved for code-word level intelligence but not transcripts of diplomatic discussions. Why would the full transcript of Trump's so called "perfect" phone call be hidden? If he did nothing wrong, releasing the full transcript should exonerate him of any wrong doing.
The only logical conclusion is that Trump is guilty, and he knows that releasing the full transcript, and allowing Mulvaney, Bolton and others to testify under oath would be his undoing. Trump knows that after seeing what happened to Manafort, Cohen and Stone, that no one else is going to risk going to prison for his crimes.
Trump's own National Security Adviser, John Bolton quit over Trump's scheme to bribe Ukraine.
JULY 10
At the Trump International Hotel in Washington, Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, asks Mr. Volker to connect him to Giuliani. The two men later meet in Madrid.
At a White House meeting later that day in Bolton’s office, two Ukrainian officials press for an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Mr. Zelensky. Sondland blurts out that Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, promised that Mr. Zelensky would be invited if Ukraine announces “investigations.”
Bolton immediately halts the meeting. At a follow-up meeting, Sondland again presses the Ukrainians to announce investigations, this time specifying Burisma and the 2016 election as targets. Fiona Hill, one of Bolton’s top deputies, calls that session to a halt.
She and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, her subordinate, report the meetings to John Eisenberg, the chief legal adviser to the National Security Council. Bolton tells Ms. Hill to deliver a message from him: “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.”
90 minutes after Trump’s phone call, the call he used to bribe the President of Ukraine into opening up a fabricated investigation on the Bidens, Michael Duffey, a Trump-appointed senior official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sent this July 25 email to Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker and other Trump administration officials.
"Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration's plan to review assistance to Ukraine, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional [Department of Defense] obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process."
"Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction."
Sept 9,
The whistleblower's complaint is delivered to the House intel committee. Trump now realizes that he's been busted, and the JIG IS UP!!!😲
SEPT. 11
Two days after the House intel committee is notified of the whistle-blower complaint and opens an investigation, Trump reverses course and releases the hold on the military aid after withholding it for 55 days.
Michael Duffey's email to OMB Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker on Sept 11, informing her that Ukrainian funds will finally be released.
Duffey: "I will be issuing an apportionment this evening to immediately release all USAI funds for obligation. I will alert you as soon as I have signed the apportionment. Thank you."
McCusker: "Copy...what happened? Thanks
Duffey: "Still waiting on my staff to send me apportionment. Hoping to sign tonight yet. Glad to have this behind us."
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According to republicans, we have two different constitutions. There's the Constitution that was created by our Founding Fathers -- the one we're all familiar with, and then there's the "alternative" constitution, that was apparently created the day that Trump was sworn into office. According to republicans, this "alternative" constitution says that Trunp is above the law, and he can literally do whatever he wants, without consequences, and without ever being held accountable.
"I pledge allegiance, to Lord King Donald Trump, of the Dystopian States of America, and to the monarchy for which he stands, one ruler, the chosen God, with oppression and subjugation for all."
---The GOP MAGA
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DT sat in the White House, and watched the vio.lence that unfolded on our nation's Capitol for at least two whole hours, without doing anything, and without saying a word, other than to blast his own Vice President, who eventually had to flee for his life.
The truth of the matter is, if he had not filled his followers heads with lies for months, and if he had not held that rally, where he instructed his followers to march to the Capitol and fight like he// in order to "stop the steal" the insurrection never would have happened. Because without the use of vio.lence, how else were they going to stop the so called steal?
The election was over. The only thing that remained was for Pence to count and certify the electoral votes. So the only thing they could've been fighting for, was to bring a stop to the counting of the electoral votes, which would officially certify Biden as the next democratically elected president.
And vio.lence was the only option they had left. DT had already exhausted every other legal and illegal option. So on January 6, the vio.lence card was the only card he had left, and he played it.
The insurrection was Trump's revenge against democracy and our Constitution.
It was his way of getting back at everyone who refused to violate our Constitution on his behalf. Watching his followers storm the Capitol while wearing his hats and waving flags emblazoned with his name, was the greatest day of his presidency. He had never felt more like the dictator he's always wanted to be than he did on that day. And he reveled in it.
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In 1994, a Democrat led Congress passed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act — commonly called the assault weapons ban.
It prohibited the manufacture or sale for civilian use of certain semi-automatic weapons. The act also banned magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more.
In 2004, the Republican led Congress refused to renew the 10 year assault weapons ban after it expired.
Before the 1994 ban:
From 1981 – the earliest year in our analysis – to the rollout of the assault weapons ban in 1994, the proportion of deaths in mass shootings in which an assault rifle was used was lower than it is today.
Yet in this earlier period, mass shooting deaths were steadily rising. Indeed, high-profile mass shootings involving assault rifles – such as the ki//ing of five children in Stockton, California, in 1989 and a 1993 San Francisco office attack that left eight victimsDead – provided the impetus behind a push for a prohibition on some types of gun.
During the 1994-2004 ban:
In the years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Even including 1999’s Columbine High School massacre – the deadliest MassShooting during the period of the ban – the 1994 to 2004 period saw lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and deaths resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.
From 2004 onward:
The data shows an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.
Breaking the data into absolute numbers, between 2004 and 2017 – the last year of our analysis – the average number of yearly deaths attributed to mass shootings was 25, compared with 5.3 during the 10-year tenure of the ban and 7.2 in the years leading up to the prohibition on assault weapons.
Saving hundreds of lives
We calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70% lower during the period in which the assault weapons ban was active. The proportion of overall gun homicides resulting from mass shootings was also down, with nine fewer mass-shooting-related fatalities per 10,000 shooting deaths.
Taking population trends into account, a model we created based on this data suggests that had the federal assault weapons ban been in place throughout the whole period of our study – that is, from 1981 through 2017 – it may have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the years in which there was no ban.
Michael J. Klein, New York University
The Conversation
Published: June 8, 2022
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Ex-Trump campaign official Rick Gates testified under oath in Roger Stone's trial that he was in the presidential limousine with Trump, and he'd heard Stone tell Trump about the WikiLeaks release of hacked DNC emails before the dump happened — a direct contradiction of what Trump told Mueller in his written testimony.
In his under oath testimony, Gates described how he'd seen Trump get a phone call from Stone in summer 2016, and after Trump hung up, told Gates "more information would be coming" regarding WikiLeaks..
Going back as far as April 2016, Gates said, Stone told him that information would be released by WikiLeaks that could be helpful to Trump’s campaign. He reiterated this the following month. All this was before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated publicly on June 12, 2016, that he had pending releases related to Hillary Clinton.
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails from the DNC — emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.
After that, Gates testified, the top levels of the Trump campaign were very interested in what Stone knew about WikiLeaks. Gates said Manafort asked him to follow up with Stone to try to learn more about WikiLeaks’s plans. And Gates said that Manafort indicated he would update others on the campaign, “including the candidate” — Donald Trump.
Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, shortly after the DNC email releases began, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.”
October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre, PA: "This just came out," Trump said. "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks."
October 12, 2016 in Ocala, FL: "This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable," Trump said. "It tells you the inner heart, you gotta read it."
October 13, 2016 in Cincinnati, OH: "It's been amazing what's coming out on WikiLeaks."
October 31, 2016 in Warren, MI: "Another one came in today," Trump said. "This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove."
November 4, 2016 in Wilmington, OH: "Getting off the plane, they were just announcing new WikiLeaks, and I wanted to stay there, but I didn't want to keep you waiting," said Trump. "Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks."
Trump on April 11, 2019, after Julian Assange is arrested:
"I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing, and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange. I know nothing really about him. That's not my deal in life." 😲
Has the world ever seen a bigger liar than Trump? I THINK NOT.....
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Dr. Anthony Fauci was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in1984. He oversees an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria as well as emerging diseases such as Ebola and Zika. NIAID also supports research on transplantation and immune-related illnesses, including autoimmune disorders, asthma and allergies.
Dr. Fauci has advised six Presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues. He was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program that has saved millions of lives throughout the developing world.
Dr. Fauci also is the longtime chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response.
Dr. Fauci is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has been awarded 38 honorary doctoral degrees and is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,200 scientific publications, including several major textbooks.
In a 2019 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 41st most highly cited researcher of ALL TIME. According to the Web of Science, he ranked 8th out of more than 2.2 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2019. Today, countless people around the world owe their very lives to Dr. Fauci, and the work he has done.
Dr. Fauci does not set policy in this country, because like he said, that's not his job, nor his responsibility. But now we have miscreants like Tucker Carlson, Paul Ryan, and other republicans trying to infer that Dr. Fauci is somehow in charge of setting policy for the coronavirus response, which is a blatant lie. Dr. Fauci is easily one of the most qualified medical experts in the field of infectious diseases in the world, with decades of experience. Dr. Fauci can't make Trump do anything. He can't make states do anything. His job is to provide the president, and other elected officials, with the best possible advice on how to deal with the pandemic. That advice is based on science, facts, and decades of experience. Trump will either take that expert advice, or he will ignore it, and do whatever his tremendous gut tells him to do.
Why anyone would choose to listen to Trump instead of Dr. Fauci is beyond me. Call me Krazy, but if I want to know how to effectively deal with a pandemic outbreak, I'm calling Dr. Fauci. If I want to know how to bankrupt multiple casinos, or set up a fake university and charity foundation, or lie like it's my job, or launder money with the Russians, then I'm calling Trump, and nobody but Trump.
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Trump sat in the White House, and watched the vio.lence that unfolded on our nation's Capitol for at least two whole hours, without doing anything, and without saying a word, other than to blast his own Vice President, who eventually had to flee for his life from the Capitol.
Watching his followers storm the Capitol while wearing his hats and waving flags emblazoned with his name, was the greatest day of Trump's presidency. He has never felt more like the dictator he's always wanted to be than he did on that day.
The truth of the matter is, if Trump had not filled his followers heads with lies for months, and if he had not held that rally, where he instructed his followers to march to the Capitol and fight like he// in order to "stop the steal" the insurrection never would have happened. Because without the use of vio.lence, how else were they going to stop the so called steal?
The problem with Trump's lawyer's argument, is that there was literally nothing left to fight for, because the election was over. The only thing that remained was for Pence to count and certify the electoral votes. So the only thing they could've been fighting for, was to bring a stop to the counting of the electoral votes, which would officially certify Biden as the next democratically elected president.
And vio.lence was the only option they had left. Trump had already exhausted every other legal and illegal option. So on January 6, the vio.lence card was the only card Trump had left, and he played it.
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DT sat in the White House, and watched the vio.lence that unfolded on our nation's Capitol for at least two whole hours, without doing anything, and without saying a word, other than to blast his own Vice President, who eventually had to flee for his life.
The truth of the matter is, if he had not filled his followers heads with lies for months, and if he had not held that rally, where he instructed his followers to march to the Capitol and fight like he// in order to "stop the steal" the insurrection never would have happened. Because without the use of vio.lence, how else were they going to stop the so called steal?
The election was over. The only thing that remained was for Pence to count and certify the electoral votes. So the only thing they could've been fighting for, was to bring a stop to the counting of the electoral votes, which would officially certify Biden as the next democratically elected president.
And vio.lence was the only option they had left. DT had already exhausted every other legal and illegal option. So on January 6th, the violence card was the only card he had left, and he played it.
The insurrection was Trump's revenge against our democracy and our Constitution.
It was his way of getting back at everyone who didn't vote for him, and those who refused to violate our Constitution on his behalf. Watching his followers storm the Capitol while wearing his hat and waving flags emblazoned with his name, was the greatest day of his presidency. He had never felt more like the dictator he's always wanted to be than he did on that day. And he reveled in it.
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Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth..
Steve Bannon’s contacts with Stone during the 2016 campaign was one of the featured parts of Stone’s trial..
"I think we did, yes,” said Bannon, when asked during Stone's trial whether the Trump campaign viewed Stone as its “access point” to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
Stone’s denials of having any contact with WikiLeaks were obliterated by testimony from people like Bannon and a trail of emails and phone records. One message from Aug. 16, 2016, shows Stone telling Bannon on the day he took over as campaign CEO about the prospect that WikiLeaks would drop more damaging documents for the Clinton campaign.
“I have an idea … to save Trump’s @55,” Stone wrote.
Bannon testified that he heard repeatedly from Stone — before he even took over as Trump campaign chief — about his access to WikiLeaks. And Stone kept on talking about the potential of more detrimental materials through the late summer and early fall, at a time when Clinton had the lead in the polls.
Bannon’s contacts with Stone included an Oct. 4, 2016, exchange after a much-hyped Assange news conference, which fueled the hashtag "October?surprise" but it turned out to be a bust.
“It was a big dud, yes,” Bannon said.
But a few days later, WikiLeaks dumped emails stolen from the Clinton campaign just minutes after The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape. Bannon described that chain of events as the “Billy Bush weekend” — a reference to Trump bragging about grabbing women by the p..
Ex-Trump campaign official Rick Gates testified under oath in Roger Stone's trial that he was in the presidential limousine with Trump, and he'd heard Stone tell Trump about the WikiLeaks release of hacked DNC emails before the dump happened — a direct contradiction of what Trump told Mueller in his written testimony.
In his under oath testimony, Gates described how he'd seen Trump get a phone call from Stone in summer 2016, and after Trump hung up, told Gates "more information would be coming" regarding WikiLeaks.
Going back as far as April 2016, Gates said, Stone told him that information would be released by WikiLeaks that could be helpful to Trump’s campaign. He reiterated this the following month. All this was before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated publicly on June 12, 2016, that he had pending releases related to Hillary Clinton.
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails from the DNC — emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.
After that, Gates testified, the top levels of the Trump campaign were very interested in what Stone knew about WikiLeaks. Gates said Manafort asked him to follow up with Stone to try to learn more about WikiLeaks’s plans. And Gates said that Manafort indicated he would update others on the campaign, “including the candidate” — Donald Trump.
Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, shortly after the DNC email releases began, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.”
Trump on April 11, 2019, after Julian Assange is arrested:
"I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing, and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange. I know nothing really about him. That's not my deal in life." 😲
"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
--Winston Churchill
And ye shall know the TRUTH, and the truth shall make you free...
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Barr is clearly lying. He can tell by the downward shift of his eyes.
Trump is terrified that Flynn and Roger Stone won't be able to do a long stretch in prison, and will decide to cut a deal instead, and reveal all of Trump's crimes. Stone could corroborate Rick Gates' testimony that Trump did in fact collude with WikiLeaks..
In the video of a December 2015 dinner celebrating the 10th birthday of Putin's propaganda network RT at a Moscow hotel, Putin and a host of Russian luminaries toasted the state-controlled news channel that U.S. intelligence calls a Kremlin mouthpiece. And next to Putin at the head table, in the seat of honor, was Michael Flynn, who would later become Trump's national security adviser, was already advising Trump's campaign when he was being paid $45,000 to speak at the gala.
"It is not a coincidence that Flynn was placed next to President Putin," said Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador in Moscow "Flynn was considered a close Trump adviser. Why else would they want him there?"
Flynn's Moscow jaunt, like his oddly timed phone chats with the Russian ambassador, has been well reported. The video shows that the Dec. 10, 2015 dinner, was attended by a healthy serving of ex-russian spies, Putin's cronies and oligarchs.
Sergey Ivanov, then Putin's chief of staff, sat directly across the table from Flynn. A former KGB general who at one point ran KGB operations in Africa, he has also served as Russian defense minister and deputy prime minister. Ivanov had been under U.S. and European sanctions for a year and a half by the date of the dinner.
Next to Ivanov was Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, but more importantly his de facto national security adviser, say U.S. officials. Flanking Putin on his right, two seats from Flynn, sat Alexey Gromov, Putin's deputy chief of staff. U.S. intelligence considers Gromov to be Putin's head propagandist. According to the January 6 Intelligence Community report on Russian interference in the U.S. election. He too was on U.S. and European sanctions the day of the dinner.
After Putin got up to make his speech, his place at Flynn's side was taken by Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief. A personal friend of Putin, she worked in one of his presidential campaigns before being chosen by Gromov to head RT. U.S. intelligence assessment of RT paints Simonyan as the lead person, along with Gromov, engaging in information warfare against U.S. policies. She is described as closely tied to, controlled by the Kremlin.
Beyond the head table, Russia's oligarchs filled many of the seats. Like Viktor Vekselberg, whose billions are in oil and aluminum and who is a business partner of Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the owner of the world's largest collection of Faberge eggs.
Flynn had already been a frequent guest on RT in the months prior to the dinner. When Putin finished his speech that night, Flynn was among the first to leap to his feet and offer a standing ovation.
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Jared and his adviser Hope Hicks, were behind Trump's church photo-op on Monday, where peaceful protesters were dispersed with tear gas. Hicks, who served as Trump's closest campaign aide and later as White House communications director before a stint at Fox, recently returned to work at the White House under Jared Kushner.
Bunker Boy was reportedly embarrassed and upset by news reports that like Adolf, he had scurried down to his bunker as protests raged outside. So in the spirit of Caligula, Trump stormed over to St. John's Church to hold up a book that he has never read or opened for cameras. Police backed by the National Guard unleashed tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang shells on peaceful American citizens, just to clear the path for Bunker Boy.
Hicks and Jared reportedly hatched the dubious plan with others at the White House, to have Trump march over to the church, and pose for pictures holding a bible, while looking like a stone-cold lunatic.
Attorney General Barr personally ordered law enforcement officials to pull a Tiananmen
Square, and clear the park of protesters, a Justice Department official stated.
And even though the photo-op stunt was an unmitigated disaster, some of Trump's aides reportedly celebrated the incident, but apparently not all of them.
"I've never been more ashamed," one senior White House official told Axios. "I'm really honestly disgusted. I'm sick to my stomach, and they're all celebrating it. They're very very proud of themselves."
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In May of 2018, When China's President Xi Jinping, who is the leader of the COMMUNIST PARTY of China, changed the country’s constitution to allow him to stay in power indefinitely, Trump praised him for it. Just let that sink in for a moment.
In remarks at Mar-a-Lago, Trump praised the Chinese president’s power grab and said he wouldn’t mind trying it himself.
Trump: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
June 15 2018
Trump praises Kim Jung Un, the dictator who continues to threaten America with nuclear war, for his authoritarian control over his people.
Trump: "He's the head of the country," Trump said of Kim during a Fox interview.
"And I mean he's the strong head. Don't let anyone think anything different."
"He speaks and his people sit up at attention," Trump added. "I want my people to do the same."
Sept 30 2018:
At a rally, Trump confesses to the love he has for Kim Jung Un, the most brutal dictator in modern history.
Trump: "I like him, he likes me. I guess that’s okay. Am I allowed to say that?” Trump said. “And then we fell in love, okay. No really. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
These are the inexplicable and indefensible words of a sitting US President. And no amount of lies, spin, or deflections will ever justify them, or erase them.
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Trump: "I happen to know more about vaccines than any doctor. In fact, I have my own people, the best people by the way, working on a coronavirus vaccine at TUMC, Trump University Medical Center. We should have the vaccine ready within the hour, if not sooner. Plus my vaccine will come with a bonus....it also cures gout. However unfortunately, some minor side effects of the vaccine may include hallucinations, loss of teeth, permanent blindness, elephantiasis, and acute death."
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DT sat in the White House, and watched the vio.lence that unfolded on our nation's Capitol for at least two whole hours, without doing anything, and without saying a word, other than to blast his own Vice President, who eventually had to flee for his life from the Capitol.
Watching his followers storm the Capitol while wearing his hats and waving flags emblazoned with his name, was the greatest day of DT's presidency. He has never felt more like the dictator he's always wanted to be than he did on that day.
The truth of the matter is, if he had not filled his followers heads with lies for months, and if he had not held that rally, where he instructed his followers to march to the Capitol and fight like he// in order to "stop the steal" the insurrection never would have happened. Because without the use of vio.lence, how else were they going to stop the so called steal?
The problem with DT's lawyer's argument, is that there was literally nothing left to fight for, because the election was over. The only thing that remained was for Pence to count and certify the electoral votes. So the only thing they could've been fighting for, was to bring a stop to the counting of the electoral votes, which would officially certify Biden as the next democratically elected president.
And vio.lence was the only option they had left. DT had already exhausted every other legal and illegal option. So on January 6, the vio.lence card was the only card he had left, and he played it.
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For two years, ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower. In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States.
The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment and arrest of at least 29 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away. Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest during the FBI raid on Trump Tower. Today, he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Tokhtakhounov's whereabouts remained unknown for the next seven months after the raid on Trump Tower. The Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.
“He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News...
In 1984, a Russian immigrant named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin was fixated on one apartment building on Fifth Avenue,Trump Tower.
The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of Trump, who personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin. If the transaction seemed suspicious, there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises..
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money" A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in NY. His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
Many Russian mobsters used Trump's apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
With Trump's constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. Public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all, Semion Mogilevich.
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one that places him at the top of the Russian mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has laundered money through more than 100 front companies around the world. In 1991, he made a move that led directly to Trump Tower. That year, the FBI says, Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to spring a fellow mob boss, Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the brains, Ivankov was the enforcer..
The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, the Taj Mahal was fined $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering regulations for years..
The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”
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Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
― Thomas Jefferson
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
― George Washington, George Washington's Farewell Address
“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.”
― Tiffany Madison
“Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may”
― Daniel Webste
“There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism, followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia
“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb..”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
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The NRA / National Russian Association has willfully obscured where its money goes, permitted multiple conflicts of interest and engaged in dubious payout arrangements, all while crying out to its members for more donations.
The investigation into the NRA found that hundreds of millions of dollars were siphoned off to top NRA executives and vendors, and that public relations firm Ackerman McQueen, which has worked with the gun group since the 1970s, was essentially running the ship. Tax filings for 2017 reveal that the NRA paid Ackerman McQueen more than $40 million that year.
The NRA and Ackerman McQueen have become so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, who served as the NRA’s president, was paid roughly $1 million a year through Ackerman, according to two NRA sources. According to interviews and to documents obtained — federal tax forms, charity records, contracts, corporate filings, and internal communications — a small group of NRA executives, contractors, and vendors has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements.
Memos created by a senior NRA employee describe a workplace distinguished by secrecy, self-dealing, and greed, whose leaders have encouraged disastrous business ventures and questionable partnerships, and have marginalized those who object. “Management has subordinated its judgment to the vendors,” the documents allege. “Trust in the top has eroded.”
Marc Owens, former head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt enterprises, stated that the “litany of red flags is just extraordinary.”
“The materials reflect one of the broadest arrays of likely transgressions that I’ve ever seen,” Owens said. “There is a tremendous range of what appears to be the misuse of assets for the benefit of certain vendors and people in control. Those facts, if confirmed, could lead to the revocation of the NRA’s tax-exempt status.” And without its tax-exempt status, the NRA would likely not survive.”
This latest hit can be added to a long list of problems for the NRA. In 2017, the group reported a loss of $55 million in income as membership plummeted.
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Trump: "I happen to know more about vaccines than any doctor. In fact, I have my own people, the best people by the way, working on a coronavirus vaccine at TUMC, Trump University Medical Center. We should have the vaccine ready within the hour, if not sooner. Plus my vaccine will come with a bonus....it also cures gout. However unfortunately, some minor side effects of the vaccine may include hallucinations, loss of teeth, permanent blindness, elephantiasis, and acute death."
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What do Putin, Kim Jong Un, Saudi Royal MBS, and Xi Jinping all have in common? They are all brutal strongmen and dictators who demand respect, obedience, loyalty, and want their followers to willingly believe and do anything they tell them. What else do they have in common? They are all men that Trump admires and looks up to.
Trump: “ Kim Jong Un speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” Trump later said anyone who doesn’t cheer for anything he says is a traitor committing treason.
It doesn’t matter to Trump cultists that Trump chooses to side with Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia over America, because all Trump has to do is hold a rally, hug the American flag, while telling the crowd to shout, “U-S-A!” And then all of a sudden, that warm and fuzzy feeling of counterfeit patriotism washes over them.
At a rally held by Steve Bannon this past March, an angry and hostile woman took the mic and said, “Never in my life did I think I would like to see a dictator, but if there’s gonna be one, I want it to be Trump!” which was met with loud cheers and applause from Bannon and the crowd of cultists. It goes without saying that any American who would cheer for that, doesn't believe in liberty, freedom, or the Constitution. Anyone American that cheers for that clearly supports fascism and dictatorships. Trump's cultists don't want an elected official to govern on behalf of the people, they want an authoritarian dictator who will force on everyone else what he believes, and punish those who don’t.
Trump cultists always brag about their love and support for our troops and veterans, then continue to worship a man who steps on the military every chance he gets. Trump promised he would donate to military charities, then didn’t, then lied about it. He attacked John McCain during the campaign for no reason, attacked him throughout his term, and continues to attack McCain after his passing.
When Republican Congressman and war veteran Dan Crenshaw, who lost his eye in combat serving this country, tweeted to Trump, “Seriously stop talking about Senator John McCain,” Trump supporters turned on veteran Crenshaw and harassed, threatened and insulted him on twitter. They defended a known coward and draft dodger, and attacked Crenshaw, a wounded war veteran who served this country honorably. Let that sink in for a moment.
At a rally in August 2016, a war veteran presented his Purple Heart medal to Trump, and he took it and said, “I always wanted one of these, this way is much easier.” Utterly disgusting.
No other politician, Republican or Democrat, would have EVER accepted that from a veteran.
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COVID-19: "I am immune to Trump's lies and gaslighting. Ignorance, and misinformation from Trump and Fox only makes me stronger. I can't be defeated with phony patriotism, guns, or flag waving. I can't be defeated with magic, because I am real, and magic is not. I can only be defeated with science, facts, unselfishness, and common sense. I am nothing like the flu, but the flu is a fan of mine, and it wants to be like me when it grows up. I can't be defeated with thoughts and prayers, so going to places of worship won't save you. Currently there is no cure for me, and that's the problem. I recognize no one's authority. Selfish ignorant people like Trump and his cult are the wind beneath my wings, they give me life. I've had success in other countries, but America is making me great again."💪😆
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Trump should just stop talking all together, because he doesn't help, he only hurts, and has never solved a single problem in his entire life. He doesn't solve problems, he only creates problems, or he exacerbates them. Trump himself is a systemic problem for the country, on multiple levels. He portrayed the pandemic as a hoax, and believes he knows more than medical experts in their own fields. To put it mildly, he is a walking talking, living breathing fk up.
Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” —CNBC interview..
Jan. 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment— 5 — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us, that I can assure you.” —Trump speech in Michigan.
Feb. 26: “So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” — Trump White House briefing.
Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump press conference.
Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting.
March 4: “We have a very small number of people in this country infected. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people from a cruise ship. We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” — Trump White House meeting.
This is what you get when you have an illegitimate president who doesn't believe in facts or science, but instead immerses himself in buffoonery like magic and sorcery.
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A person as profoundly ignorant and divorced from reality as Trump, should never be placed into a position of power or leadership. Especially when the safety, health, and lives of others are at stake..
It's no secret that Trump hates it whenever anyone tries to tell him the truth. And over the last 3 years, he fired all of the most qualified and experienced people within his cabinet and administration. He's now left with an unqualified staff of C and D list sycophants, grifters, nincompoops, scallywags, and the most unprincipled neophytes ever assembled. These yes men will say and do anything in order to avoid the wrath of the orange bully's ire.
President Obama left Trump with a global health infrastructure within White House national security council, and in typical Trump fashion, he got rid of it simply because he didn't understand it, and didn't care enough to even try to understand it.
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"Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one."
John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Back in 2016, Dean said that Trump could easily be the most corrupt presidents ever—and possibly get away with it.
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested."
Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.
“I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean, to be unmolested by any such struggle." Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
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Democracies depend on norms — unwritten rules about how leaders and citizens should behave. One norm is forbearance — the idea that political power should be used with restraint rather than weaponized and taken to its lawful limits. Such norms have little standing in today’s Republican Party.
There was, for example, no constitutional barrier to prevent Wisconsin’s outgoing Republican governor, Scott Walker, in cohoots with the state’s Repub Legislature, to strip the governor’s office of power before the incoming Dem governor could take office in 2019. But it violated the longstanding norm of American politics that the outgoing party accept the change in power that comes with losing an election.
North Carolina’s Republican Legislature pulled the same stunt in 2016, when the state’s voters elected a Democratic governor. Republican state legislatures, have also pushed gerrymandering beyond ethical limits. In Wisconsin’s 2018 election, Republican candidates received only 45 percent of the popular vote but won 63 percent of the state Assembly’s seats. In a 2019 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling, the 5 Republican appointees on the court held that Wisconsin’s rigged system did not violate voters’ constitutional rights.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was designed to end the voter suppression that had long plagued America’s elections. It worked as intended, until Republicans began devising schemes to keep minorities from voting. In 2017, North Dakota Republicans enacted a law that requires voters to have written proof of a residential address before they are eligible to vote. The law targets Native Americans who live on rural tribal lands, which don’t have street names and numbers on all of their roads. Here, too, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees in a 5-to-4 decision allowed the policy to stand.
The idea of disenfranchising minority voters was hatched by the Republican-controlled legislatures of Indiana and Georgia. Enacted in 2006, Indiana’s law required residents to have a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, in order to register to vote. Republican legislators knew who they were targeting. Minorities, young adults, and people of low income — all of whom tend to vote Democratic.
Since then, roughly 30 Republican-controlled states have enacted voter-ID laws. Some were forced to reenact their law after a court struck down the first attempt.
Although Republicans say that voter IDs are intended to prevent voter fraud, there is no evidence for the claim, and their real purpose is clear. As longtime Republican political consultant Carter Wrenn said: “Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” Republican lawmakers in Florida and Pennsylvania slipped up and publicly said that their aim was to suppress the Democratic vote.
But Republicans are playing with fire, because voter suppression lengthens the memory of those suppressed. The votes of Black Americans are now all but lost to the GOP. Latino voters vote 2 to 1 Democratic. Asian-Americans, who not that long ago sided with the Republican Party, are now one of the Democrats’ most loyal voting groups.
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Just put yourself in Lev Parnas' shoes for a moment. Just imagine that you are a loyal Trump cultist. You became a loyal MAGA hat wearing Trump cultist. You partnered with Rudy, and went to Ukraine to help carry out Trump's bribery scheme. You even put yourself in legal jeopardy for Trump by funneling tons of Russian money into his super-PAC.
Parnas received a $1 million payment from Russia and tried to hide it from investigators, prosecutors have now stated. Parnas, who was charged with illegally funneling foreign cash to Republican politicians, including a pro-Trump super PAC, received $1 million from a mysterious account in Russia in September, which he conveniently forgot to disclose to the government.
So then you get caught, arrested, and indicted. Then you turn on the TV one day, to see your cult leader, the man you loved and admired, the man that you risked everything for, announce to the world, that he's never met you, and has no idea who you are. 😲 How would you feel? 😄
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Let's be honest, deep down, we all know that he said it.
We all remember what Trump said about John McCain and our PoWs. It's all on video. But I'm sure that won't stop Trump from denying that he ever said that either.
So riddle me this, how is it that every other world leader made it to the cemetery for the WW1 memorial service in France, but Trump couldn't!? Hmmm.😞
So Trump says the entire thing is a hoax, just like his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was a hoax. Nope...no, bad example.
So just like his letter of intent to build a tower in Moscow was a hoax. Nope...no, bad example.
So just like Don Jr's Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was a hoax. Nope....no, bad example.
So just like the coronavirus was a hoax. Nope, another bad example.
Good grief, I give up. Smh 😔 Of course Trump said it!!
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The DoD warned several times that continuing to withhold the aid violated the Impoundment Control Act, which stipulates that if the federal funds are not spent on their designated purpose within a certain period, they will be taken, or impounded, by the Treasury Department.
The unredacted emails between Defense Department and Office of Management and Budget officials revealed that between June and September — when the Ukrainian aid was ultimately released following the whistleblower's complaint — the Defense Department repeatedly asked the OMB why the military aid was being held up.
The timeline of Trump's impeachable acts, and the DoJ sloppy attempt at a cover-up:
● June 19, OMB aide, Robert Blair, learned that Trump was questioning the delivery of the aid package, at which point Blair told Russell Vought, the acting head of the office, that "we need to hold it up."
● That day, another OMB official, Michael Duffey, emailed the acting Defense Department comptroller, Elaine McCusker, and copied Mark Sandy, an OMB official on national-security programs, to ask if she had "insight on this funding."
● After McCusker explained on June 25 which companies were producing the military equipment and said that only $7 million of the Pentagon's $250 million part of the package had been spent, Blair told Mick Mulvaney on June 27 that they should "expect Congress to become unhinged" by withholding the aid.
● July 25, Sandy officially froze the Ukraine aid. This was also the day Trump spoke with President Zelensky on the phone and asked him to launch a bogus investigation on Joe Biden and his son. Shortly after Trump's call, Duffey emailed several Pentagon officials and asked them to "please hold off on any additional DOD obligations of these funds." He requested that the recipients keep the directive "closely held to those who need to know" because of "the sensitive nature of the request."
● McCusker replied that same day and asked whether the OMB had cleared the hold with the Defense Department's lawyers. This was the first sign of the Pentagon's concerns about the legality of withholding the aid.
● July 26, John Rood, the head of policy at the Pentagon, emailed Defense Secretary Mark Esper a readout of a meeting in which top national-security officials voiced their "unanimous support" for sending the security assistance. On August 9, McCusker warned Sandy, Duffey, and other senior OMB officials that if the aid was not released soon, it might affect the "timely execution" of the program. "We hope it won't and will do all we can to execute once the policy decision is made, but can no longer make that declarative statement," she wrote. The DOJ redacted this warning from McCusker, which, notably, contradicted the OMB's talking points.
● August 12, when it became clear that Trump would continue the aid freeze, McCusker emailed Duffey and asked him to include language in a footnote in a budgeting document to reflect the growing risk of withholding funding. The language was not included, and the request was redacted in the initial document release.The DOJ also redacted several emails from McCusker near the end of August raising additional legal questions about withholding the aid and the possibility that Trump's actions violated the Impoundment Control Act..
● August 28, after Politico publicly revealed the aid freeze, the OMB's general counsel, Mark Paoletta, sent around talking points including that "no action has been taken by OMB that would preclude the obligation of these funds before the end of the fiscal year."
● McCusker pushed back, writing: "I don't agree to the revised TPs — the last one is just not accurate from a financial execution standpoint, something we have been consistently conveying for a few weeks." Her response was initially redacted.
● As September came around, McCusker raised concerns about whether the Defense Department would be "adequately protected from what may happen as a result of the Ukraine obligation pause." She added, "I realize we need to continue to give the WH as much decision space as possible, but am concerned we have not officially documented the fact that we can not promise full execution at this point in the fiscal year."
● September 9, Duffey sent McCusker a misleading email suggesting that if the president greenlighted the aid but the Pentagon was not able to obligate the funding, it would be on the Pentagon and not the OMB..
● McCusker responded: "You can't be serious. I am speechless."
● September 11, after Congress became aware of a whistleblower's complaint accusing Trump of "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 election, Duffey emailed McCusker and said the president had lifted the hold on Ukraine's military aid.
● "Glad to have this behind us," he wrote..
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The true character of an individual will always be revealed when they are faced with a crisis or adversity. And the eternal question will always be: at the moment of truth, when it truly mattered, what did they do? How did they respond?
In the midst of a national health crisis, when America needed a leader the most, Trump has categorically failed. He failed at the moment of truth. It has been a catastrophic failure, with lethal consequences. His lies, indifference, and downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic, will be remembered as the greatest dereliction of duty in presidential history. It is why this virus will be remembered by historians as The TrumpVirus, and rightfully so, because it didn't have to be this way. The needless loss of more than 200 thousand American lives is now Trump's legacy.
We owe it to the more than 220 thousand American souls that are no longer with us, to remove Trump from office.
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On Fox, Rudy said he's not worried about Trump throwing him under the bus, because he has "insurance." Well clearly that can only mean one thing, Rudy is admitting to having evidence of Trump's criminality.😂
And make no mistake, Trump's other longtime partner in crime, Roger Stone, will definitely try to cut a deal. Because there is absolutely no way a coward like him is going to go to prison if he can help it. His only chance of preventing that from happening is giving up Trump.
This is usually what happens with any criminal organization when the feds are closing in on them. Trump's den of thieves has quickly turned into Barter Town in Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. We are witnessing the treacherous behavior of criminals when they start hedging their bets. Nonstop chaos, upheaval, back-stabbing, unbridled buffoonery, cowardice, and betrayal is about to ensue.
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What we've learned so far from Bolton’s book is that obstruction of justice is not the exception in Trump's White House, it's the #1 rule. And apparently, it only gets worse from there. Asking countries like Russia, China and Ukraine for quid pro quos to help him get reelected seems to be the #2 rule.
Trump unwittingly admitted to obstruction of justice in his May 2017 interview with Lester Holt. In the interview, Trump said he fired James Comey because he wouldn't shutdown the Russia investigation. I say unwittingly because Trump doesn't believe he obstructed justice, because he doesn't actually believe in the concept of justice to begin with. And he certainly doesn't believe in law & order.
Trump: "I do solemnly swear, that I will faithfully desecrate the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, pervert, offend, and violate the Constitution of the United States. So help me Putin...OR Gyna....if you're listening."
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It's almost as if the Founders were clairvoyant when they placed articles of impeachment into the Constitution. They clearly had envisioned someone like Trump in America's future. Someone who would say that as president, he can do whatever he wants. The articles of impeachment were tailor made for a wannabe dictator like Trump.
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.”
― DaShanne Stokes
“Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may”
― Daniel Webste
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
If what Trump has done isn't wrong, then that means that nothing is wrong. if Trump isn't impeachable, then that means that no president will ever be impeachable, no matter what they do. And that will spell the end of our democracy, our Constitution, and our republic. We will be back to where we were before the Declaration of Independence. It will be as if we never fought and won a war of independence against a King.
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So I guess that means that Trump is part of the Chinese misinformation campaign.
Trump Jan. 24, Twitter:
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Trump Feb. 7, Twitter:
“Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!
Trump Feb. 7, Remarks before Marine One departure:
"Late last night, I had a very good talk with President Xi, and we talked about — mostly about the coronavirus. They're working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job. They're in touch with World — the World — World Organization. CDC also. We're working together. But World Health is working with them. CDC is working with them. I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”
Trump Feb. 10, Fox interview:.
"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard."
Trump Feb. 10, rally in Manchester, N.H.:
“I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”
Trump Feb. 23, before boarding Marine One:
"I think President Xi is working very, very hard. I spoke to him. He's working very hard. I think he's doing a very good job. It's a big problem. But President Xi loves his country. He's working very hard to solve the problem, and he will solve the problem. OK?"
Trump Feb. 27, press conference:
“I spoke with President Xi. We had a great talk. He’s working very hard, I have to say. He’s working very, very hard. And if you can count on the reports coming out of China, that spread has gone down quite a bit. The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.”
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From day one most Americans rightfully predicted that Trump's presidency was going to be one of the worst in modern history, but I don't think anyone ever imagined it would be an unmitigated catastrophe of this magnitude. And to add insult to injury, Trump announced that he's not responsible for anything that has happened. I'm assuming it's because deep down, he only considers himself to be a "pretend president." Trump has taken many things in life, but responsibility has never been one of them. But what he will do, is blame others for his clear and obvious failures.
Because of Trump, America has had the worst response to the pandemic than any country in the world. So far, more than 140 thousand Americans have lost their lives to the coronavirus. And many of those lives were needlessly lost due to Trump's indifference, gross incompetence, lack of leadership, criminal negligence, and dereliction of duty. I can still remember Trump telling us that everything was under control, and all we had to do was inject ourselves with disinfectants, and the virus would just magically disappear. Well today, we can all acknowledge that the virus did not disappear, but thousands of Americans did.
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Trump is infamous for ruining casinos and small business owners during his reign of destruction in Atlantic City.
Even as his casinos did poorly, Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen. And that is Trump in a nutshell. A narcissistic sociopathic con-man who only cares about himself, and will use others to achieve his own self-serving desires.
In interviews with The Times, Trump acknowledged that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.
Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed.
His casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders.
After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Trump avoided a second potential crisis by taking his casinos public and shifting the risk to stockholders.
And he never was able to draw in enough gamblers to support all of the borrowing. During a decade when other casinos there thrived, Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.
Trump now says that he left Atlantic City at the perfect time. Well no sh't. He left after he had ruined everything, and there was no more money for him to grift. The record shows that he struggled to hang on to his casinos years after the city had peaked, and failed only because his investors no longer wanted him in a management role..
He just did not put the equity into the projects he should have to keep them solvent,” said H. Steven Norton, a casino consultant. “When he went bankrupt, he not only cost bondholders money, but he hurt a lot of small businesses that helped him construct the Taj Mahal.”
In an interview with the Times, Trump said “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.” Like a true sociopath, Trump boasts about how he ravaged Atlantic City, without any regard for all the people and businesses he hurt along the way.
Beth Rosser of West Chester, Pa., is still bitter over what happened to her father, whose company Triad Building Specialties nearly collapsed when Trump took the Taj into bankruptcy. It took three years to recover any money owed for his work on Trump's casino" she said, and her father received only 30 cents on the dollar.
“Trump crawled his way to the top on the back of little guys, one of them being my father,” said Ms. Rosser, who runs Triad today. “He had no regard for the thousands of men and women who worked on those projects."
“He put a number of local contractors and suppliers out of business when he didn’t pay them,” said Steven P. Perskie, who was New Jersey’s top casino regulator in the early 1990s. “So when he left Atlantic City, it wasn’t, ‘Sorry to see you go.’ It was, ‘How fast can you get the he// out of here?’”
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In her book, Trump's niece Mary describes Donald as a “toxic” bully who practices “cheating as a way of life,” and someone who values money above anything.
Trump's own sister also explained how she tried to help Trump academically, noting that “he was a brat,” and that, “I did his homework for him” and “drove him around NYC to try to get him into college.” She said she didn’t know of anything Donald had ever accomplished on his own, but noted that “he has five bankruptcies” which he achieved all by himself." “You CAN'T trust him,” she added.
Trump's failure as a president was inevitable. Trump was never equipped to do his job. He doesn't have the necessary tools or the wherewithal to do his job. Trump is grossly incapacitated intellectually, mentally, emotionally, temperamentally, socially, and psychologically. He couldn't properly do his job as president even if he wanted to. (Which he doesn't)
Trump was always going to fail, and he was always going to blame his failures on someone or something. Lying, cheating, and bullying are his only tools for survival. They are the tools of his trade, which is being an agent of chaos, misery, and destruction. It's all he knows. He is a sad and pathetic excuse for a human being. In fact, he is less of a human being, and more of a collection of every human flaw known to mankind, all rolled into one man.
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President Obama created the NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense, and he passed it on to Trump in 2017. And then Trump dismantled it, because he doesn't believe in science or facts, so he didn't understand it..
“I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes said before pointing to a National Security Council (NSC) pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump administration in 2018..
And what we did is set up, in the White House, ... an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump..
And when you don’t have an office like that, you don’t have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted upon. When you see an outbreak in a place like Wuhan, China, you want people in the White House who are thinking about what needs to be done right away so that you don’t get behind the curve, which is what happened in this White House.
You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,”
--Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama..
Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of disbelief. Experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House, charged with preparing for WHEN, NOT if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
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June 3, 2016, Don Jr receives this email at 10:36 AM, from Rob Goldstone.
"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting."
"The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."
"This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin" Goldstone wrote.
Don Jr. agrees to hold the meeting at Trump Tower, and sets the date for June 9.
On June 7, 2016, just days before the Trump Tower meeting, Trump announced a “major speech” he claimed would reveal damaging information about Hillary. "I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” Trump said. “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting."
On June 9, 2016, a meeting was held in Trump Tower between three senior members of the Donald Trump presidential campaign – Don Jr., Kushner, and Manafort – and at least five other people, including Russian Russian agents.
On July 27 2016, on national tv, Trump invites Russia to meddle in our elections.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Later that same day, the 12 Russian operatives indicted in the special counsel investigation, launched the 1st cyber attack against the DNC.
Translation: Trump is guilty of treason.
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Trump said he would drain the swamp. His supporters bought it. Then he proceeded to drain the swamp directly into his white house. He has brought into his administration, more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will only enrich their businesses.
Trump said he'd be the most transparent president ever. His supporters bought it. Trump has now told more than 15k documented lies since taking office, making him the most prolific liar in history, and for any foreseeable future imaginable.
He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. His supporters bought it. Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, criminally incompetent White House in America history. It's an administration spinning in a vortex of lies, pandemonium, betrayal, unbridled buffoonery, treason, upheaval, nepotism, skulduggery, moral turpitude, and sanctioned lawlessness.
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I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
--Abraham Lincoln
Make no mistake, this is far from over. The congressional oversight committee hearings are next. And they will be hearing testimony from those who were in the loop. Between, Parnas and Bolton, the truth about Trump's crimes will inevitably be revealed. Every week will bring a new revelation of the criminal activities of this illegitimate president, along with the names of all the Republicans who were complicit in aiding and abetting his criminal activity.. The truth will all come to the light eventually. It's only a matter of time.
"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
--Winston Churchill
"Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
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Republican campaign finance reports, which are, available to the public, show connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. Bottom line, our campaign finance laws are now a threat to our country.
Len Blavatnik, isa dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the the Soviet Union and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.
In 2015-16, Blavatnik's political contributions soared as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Moscow Mitch, Rubio and Lindsey "Two-faced" Graham.
Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.
Nearly 4% of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papersin 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.
We already know that Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. In the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he Deripaska needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."
Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle.
Andrew Intrater, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in NY. in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,"
Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund.
In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. The common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg.
Moscow Mitch knew from receiving intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Dept of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, Moscow Mitch's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.
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On Dec. 29 2016, transition adviser K. T. McFarland, wrote in an email to a colleague that sanctions announced hours before by Obama in retaliation for Russian election meddling were aimed at discrediting Trump’s victory. The sanctions,,she wrote, could also make it much harder for Mr. Trump to ease tensions with Russia, “which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote in the emails.😲
On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”
Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the “Molotov cocktail” was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia.
Trump's inauguration was celebrated jubilantly in Moscow, where Putin supporter Konstantin Rykov hosted an all-night party. Champagne flowed as an interpreter narrated the new U.S. president's speech. In Washington, the Russian Embassy tweeted, "Happy #InaugurationDay2017!" with a photo of people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Amid a busy schedule in Washington, Boris Titov — who was appointed by Putin to serve as a business ombudsman — told a Russian television station that new investment was likely to flow to Russia once the Obama era U.S. sanctions were lifted.
Businesses "are waiting for this signal, and they believe it will soon come," he said..
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U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency..
There were multiple warnings throughout December for the NSC and the White House. Government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House, but they went unheeded. The first case of COVID-19 reached the U.S. on Jan15. The WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11. Trump declared the U.S. outbreak a national emergency on March 13.
On Jan. 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first briefed Trump on the threat of the virus in a phone call. Trump made his first public comments about the virus on Jan. 22, saying he was not concerned about a pandemic and that "we have it totally under control."
On Jan. 27, White House aides met with then-acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney to try to get senior officials to take the virus threat more seriously. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, warned it could cost Trump his re-election.
On Jan. 29, economic adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House in a memo addressed to the National Security Council that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage.
On Jan. 30, Azar warned Trump in a call that the virus could become a pandemic and that China should be criticized for its lack of transparency. Trump dismissed Azar as alarmist and rejected the idea of criticizing China. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health emergency.
On Feb. 5, senators urged Trump in a briefing to take the virus more seriously and asked if additional funds were necessary. The administration made no requests at the time for emergency funding.
On Feb. 14, a memo was drafted by health officials in coordination with the National Security Council that recommended the targeted use of quarantine and isolation measures. Officials planned to present Trump with the memo when he returned from India on Feb. 25, but the meeting was canceled.
On Feb. 21, the White House coronavirus task force conducted a mock exercise of the pandemic. The group concluded that the U.S. would need to implement aggressive social distancing, even if it caused mass disruption to the economy and American lives.
On Feb. 23, Navarro doubled down on his warnings in another memo, this time addressed to the president, stating that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.
On Feb. 25, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of the virus threat and said "we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.” Trump reportedly called Azar fuming that Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to plummet.
On Jan 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield.
Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those is anyone's guess. Either way, his indifference and inaction constitutes a criminal negligence of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. So far, more than 23 thousand American lives have been lost, and many of them needlessly, as a direct consequence of Trump's moral ineptitude, sociopathic behavior, and criminal negligence, and for that, he must be held accountable.
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Trump is, and has always been, an agent of chaos. Trump doesn't solve problems, he IS the problem, just ask Atlantic City. Being a problem solver would actually require Trump's to first know history, combined with an understanding of perspectives. It would require him to be capable of reasoning and critical thinking.😂
He would have to be fully aware of his own weaknesses and limitations, combined with a willingness to listen and learn from experts with years of experience. Trump would also have to finally acknowledge that magic is not real. Last but not least, in order for Trump to become a problem solver, he would need to have the moral courage, and the moral compass to do what is right. Trump has proven that he clearly has none of the tools nor the desire to solve problems. And that is why he chooses to be an agent of chaos, because even a 2 year old child can be an agent of chaos.
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Trump likes to consider himself as a first responder as well, and he wants you to appreciate him for it.
During a July ceremony in the Rose Garden to formally sign a bill that will extend the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund through 2092, Trump told a group of more than 60 first responders an outrageous lie when he said "Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there—I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
There is no evidence that Trump participated in recovery efforts, there’s also no evidence he spent any time near ground zero in the week following the attack.
Trump has told similar egregious lies about helping first responders on 9/11 in the past. On the campaign trail on April 18, 2016, in Buffalo NY, he said: " Everyone who helped clear the rubble - and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit."😲 Super Narcissist strikes again.
Once again, there is no evidence that Trump participated in recovery efforts, there’s also no evidence he spent time at or even near ground zero.
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In an interview with the New Yorker, Tony Schwartz, the journalist who wrote Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” said of Trump “Lying is second nature to him, more than anyone else I have ever met. Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true."
Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”
When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent.
Schwartz — and other journalists who have spent extended periods of time with Trump — paint a much more disturbing picture. They describe a man constitutionally incapable of logic, moral reasoning or self-reflection.
If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”
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Trump is attempting to scapegoat the WHO, the media, and everyone for his criminal incompetence, and his failure to protect this country from a virus that he was warned about multiple times, starting back in November of last year.
"What President Obama left Trump, was a global health infrastructure that we had set up, informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under Obama said, referring to the NSC pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump in 2018.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
Trump has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a "businessperson." I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness works, and that's definitely not how a virus works. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security stated. “You don’t wait for a fire.”
President Obama left Trump with a fire department, as well as smoke detectors, and Trump simply threw them away.
Trump, being the stable genius that he is, believed it was smarter to wait and put together a fire department, AFTER a five alarm fire starts.
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On more than one occasion, Trump falsely accused President Obama of doing, what he is now doing:
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective. So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected — and as sure as you're sitting there — is to start a war with Iran. I believe that he will attack Iran sometime prior to the election because he thinks that’s the only way he can get elected. Isn’t it pathetic?”
--Trump, Nov 16, 2011
"Don't let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected--be careful Republicans!"
--Trump, Oct 22, 2012
"I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!"
--Trump, Sep 16, 2013
"Remember what I previously said--Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is."
--Trump, Sep 25, 2013
"Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!"
--Trump, Nov 10, 2013
We now know that as usual, Trump was only fantasizing about what he would do if he were president.
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The notion that Trump was actually concerned about corruption in Ukraine, or corruption in general, is laughable.
Trump is not only the most corrupt president in American history, he's the most corrupt president imaginable. If someone had told me years ago that we would ever have a president this immoral, unethical, deceitful, and sociopathic, I would have laughed. Well....I'm not laughing now.
November of last year, Trump was ordered by a judge to pay $2 m in damages for illegally using funds intended for charity to boost his 2016 presidential election campaign.
Trump had to admit to personally misusing the money, according to the New York’s attorney general office, despite having previously denied any wrongdoing.
The fine adds to several other investigations into allegations that he is using public office for self-enrichment.
The lawsuit last year states that Trump, and his three money grubbing useless children - Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric - broke campaign finance laws in 2016 by using Trump Foundation’s tax-exempt status “as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests.
Trump and his talentless children, had violated their fiduciary duties as officers and directors of the now-shuttered Trump Foundation. As a result of that failure, charitable dollars — consistently and over many years — often benefited Trump rather than the causes he repeatedly claimed he supports.
There was “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation – including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” the suit claimed.
In the agreements, Trump admitted to misusing funds from the foundation, which he dissolved last year, including to pay for a portrait himself that cost $10,000. He also agreed to pay back $11,525 he spent on sports memorabilia and champagne at a charity gala.
Trump also directed the foundation to use money for charity to buy a Tim Tebow helmet for himself, and to settle a couple of lawsuits.
Trump also admitted in the agreements to directing that $100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over an 80-foot flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort, instead of paying the expense out of his own pocket.
In addition, the charity foundation paid $158,000 to resolve a lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course, and $5,000 for ads promoting Trump’s hotels in the programs for charitable events. Trump admitted these transactions were also improper.
But let's be honest, what Trump did wasn't just improper, it was downright criminal and reprehensible.
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Whitaker will inevitably find himself in the exact same place as other past Trump sycophants, like Manafort, and Cohen, which is sitting in a room, and being questioned by Mueller for hours.
Sessions was the 1st Republican Senator to come out and endorse Trump for president. He even became one of Trump's advisors, and joined Trump's team on the campaign trail. And we all saw how Trump rewarded him. Sessions learned what all the other former Trump sycophants have learned, and what they've all learned is that a sociopath, and narcissist like Trump has no friends, he only has people who have not worn-out their usefulness to him yet. Trump feels no loyalty to anyone other than himself.
Sessions has now taken his place underneath that now crowded and cramped Trump bus. Cohen had to slide over to make some room for Jeff Session, his tiny frame shouldn't take up too much space though. They should all make sure to save plenty of room underneath that bus for Trump's soon to be next victim, Matt Whitaker. He's a rather large sycophant.
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U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout Dec, Jan, and Feb for the National Security Council, and the White House..
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Trump fired Alex Azar shortly there after because he knew too much.
Public-health experts have stated that Trump's early efforts to downplay the threat of the virus robbed the US of valuable time needed to prepare for what is now a pandemic — potentially costing thousands of lives...
You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,”
--Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama..
Trump spent "two months of completely ignoring every bit of scientific advice," Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute stated in mid-March. "We've wasted two months. And this is not a disease where you're allowed to waste two months."
Jha criticized Trump for telling Americans that everything was "under control" when it was very clear to anybody paying attention that it was not under control."
"I don't use these words lightly, and it's incredibly painful for me to say it," he said, adding: "The cost of all of this is that tens of thousands of Americans are going to die unnecessarily. It was wholly preventable, and not just preventable in hindsight — it was preventable in foresight. Everybody said this is how it was going to play out if they didn't act."
Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of disbelief. Experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized Trump’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House, that was created by President Obama, and was charged with preparing for WHEN, NOT if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics. Trump has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a "businessperson." I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness works, and that's definitely not how a virus works. “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security stated. “You don’t wait for a fire.”
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
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Trump: "I'm not taking responsibility for any of this. People are acting like I'm a REAL president and a real leader. I'm just a fraud, who with the help of Putin, managed to con my way into the Oval Office. Most people knew I was fundamentally unfit intellectually, morally, temperamentally, emotionally, and psychologically to be president. Someone as mentally unstable and divorced from reality as I clearly am, should have NEVER been allowed anywhere near the White House.
So again, don't blame me for this, blame the people who were dumb enough to vote for me. Blame republicans in Congress who aided, abetted, and pardoned my crimes. Blame people like Lindsey Graham, who knows exactly what I am, but yet continues to defend me. I'm the same person that I've always been, an unscrupulous con-man and a sociopath, but you already knew that."
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One of the most revered leaders of my beloved Marine Corps denounced Trump for his divisive and authoritarian actions against American citizens, and against our Constitution.
Semper Fi..
"I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution."
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”
“Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.”
"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."
--Marine General James Mattis
June 3, 2020
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Scherry Pierce
It's because Ted Bundy was a sociopath, and so is Trump.
Trump quote from 2004, a response to a Larry King Live caller asking how he handles stress. Trump: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter."
Spoken like the true sociopath that he is. Trump meets pretty much every diagnostic criterion of a sociopath.
• Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
• Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as "their right."
• Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities.
• Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, Trump has victims and accomplices, who end up as victims. ( Cohen, Manafort, Flynn, etc) The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
• Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion, it is more feigned than experienced, and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
• Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
● Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
• Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed. Trump blamed Dems for his government shutdown, even after he said he would take full responsibility for the shutdown.
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Reporter: "Mr president you we're with 7 WW2 heroes today, did ever consider wearing a mask."
Trump: " No I didn't. And why are they heroes? I don't know that they are heroes. What have they done that I haven't done? And what about me? I noticed you mentioned them, but you didn't mention me."
There will be no guilt, no apologies, and no sense of remorse coming from a narcissistic sociopath like Trump.
Trump pretty much checks every box for the diagnostic criterion of a sociopathic narcissist.
~Manipulative and Conning:
They never recognize the rights of others, and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They seek out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired.
~Shallow Emotions:
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would usually upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
~Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt:
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, he has victims, and accomplices, who will also end up as victims. ( Cohen, Manafort, Stone, Flynn) The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
~Callousness/Lack of Empathy:
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
~Pathological Lying:
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities.
~Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature:
Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
~Irresponsibility/Unreliability:
Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
Some of the problems a sociopathic narcissist like Trump will face include: Trouble handling criticism, easily becoming impatient or angry if they don't think they are being treated correctly. They feel easily slighted. They try to belittle others or react with rage to make themselves seem superior. They have trouble adapting to change and dealing with stress. They secretly feel insecure, vulnerable, and humiliated, and have a very fragile self-esteem.
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On May 17, 2017, during a White House meeting days after Trump’s election, Obama warned Trump about Flynn, but Trump proceeded with hiring Flynn anyway. Longtime Trump confidant Chris Christie also directly advised Trump against hiring Flynn.
“If I were president-elect of the United States, I wouldn’t let General Flynn into the White House, let alone give him a job,” Christie said in 2017..
Flynn’s lies to the FBI prompted the DoJ to warn Trump ONCE AGAIN about Flynn. On January 26, 2017, acting AG Sally Yates, personally informed the White House that Flynn lied to the FBI about his calls with Kislyak, and therefore was at risk of being blackmailed by Russia. But instead of immediately taking action against Flynn, Trump decided to reward Sally Yates for doing her job, and for her due diligence in warning him about Flynn, by firing her 3 days later. Let that sink in for a moment..
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Trump: "I spoke with the King of Saud Arabia, as one King to another King, and I asked him to do me a favor. I asked him and his family to purchase another entire floor in one of my towers to make up for the shooting in Pensacola FL, and he has agreed. That ladies and gentlemen, is called the art of the deal."
"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
Congress was furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress was rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon.
It was revealed that Trump gave approval for companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place.
House Dems began investigating Trump's nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced in February it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the US or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.
lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violates the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations.
"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million.
Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway.
In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The most recent example of Trump's emoluments clause violations came last year in August when a visit from Saudi officials to Trump's Trump International Hotel in NYC helped boost the hotel's quarterly revenue by 13% in 2018's first quarter. The bump came after two straight years of booking declines for the property.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels. A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks..
Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
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“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
"Tyranny, like he//, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis
This election is a choice between Trump/tyranny, or America.
MAKE A DECISION....
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Trump actually believes he can set a deadline for a pandemic to end. And if that doesn't work, he'll probably take a map and a sharpie, and draw a diagram of the coronavirus heading out to sea. There is no end to this man's pathological ignorance. I swear, ignorance is like a religion to him. I've never seen a human being so confident and devoted in his own stupidity.
Trump should just stop talking all together, because he has never solved a single problem in his entire life. He doesn't solve problems, he only creates problems, or he exacerbates them. Trump himself is a systemic problem for the country, on multiple levels. He portrayed the pandemic as a hoax, and believes he knows more than medical experts in their own fields. To put it mildly, he is a walking talking, living breathing fk up.
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Trump is far worse than Nixon was ever capable of being. Nixon was corrupt for sure, but even still, there were limits to how far he would go. Trump on the other hand, is a complete sociopath, without limits or boundaries. Trump has proven that he will cross any line, and violate any and all ethical standards..
John Dean served as White House counsel to Nixon from 1970 to 73, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history at the time. Just days before Trump was sworn in, Dean stated that he believed Trump could be one of the most corrupt presidents ever—and get away with it.
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean stated. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested."
Dean stated that he is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.
“I used to have one-on-one conversations with Nixon, where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle." Dean went even further in his assessment, stating: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
John Dean's words could not have been more prophetic.
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Remember all the times that Trump falsely accused President Obama of doing exactly what he's doing now?
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective. So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected — and as sure as you're sitting there — is to start a war with Iran. I believe that he will attack Iran sometime prior to the election because he thinks that’s the only way he can get elected. Isn’t it pathetic?”
--Trump, Nov 16, 2011
"Don't let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected--be careful Republicans!"
--Trump, Oct 22, 2012
"I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!"
--Trump, Sep 16, 2013
"Remember what I previously said--Obama will someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is."
--Trump, Sep 25, 2013
"Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!"
--Trump, Nov 10, 2013
We now know that as usual, Trump was only fantasizing about what he would do if he were president.
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In Sept, one month before Lev Parnas was indicted on campaign finance charges, his wife received a $1 million wire transfers from a bank account in Russia. The the source was a lawyer for Dmytro Firtash, according to a court filing by U.S. prosecutors.
Firtash is a Ukrainian oligarch who made a fortune in the natural gas trade, and is perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the scandal related to Trump's impeachment.
A billionaire with close ties to the Russian mob, Firtash is facing bribery-related charges here in the U.S. and fighting extradition from Vienna. He once attempted to buy the famous Drake Hotel in NY with the now imprisoned Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager. He's seen by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and Western governments as a corrupt instrument of Russia.
Firtash provided documents to Giuliani that he used to further his discredited claim that Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing in Ukraine. The question over Firtash's role in the effort to smear Biden deepened when Parnas said the oligarch's involvement came from an explicit quid pro quo. In exchange for Firtash's help in their effort to damage Biden, Parnas assured the oligarch they (Rudy, Trump, and Parnas) would make his U.S. legal troubles disappear.
In other words, according to Parnas: Guiliani, was so eager to help Trump and hurt Biden, that he turned to a man Ukrainian activists call their country's most dangerous oligarch — and offered the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card.
"Some folks might wonder what Mr. Giuliani was thinking. The better question is whether he WAS thinking," said Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and senior FBI official. "This is so foolhardy and so reckless, that it is difficult to fathom what he was doing or how he thought it could succeed."
Firtash lived up to his end of the alleged bargain: His lawyers provided a now-discredited affidavit from a Ukrainian prosecutor accusing Biden of wrongdoing. But Giuliani's team did not deliver.
According to Parnas and a senior U.S. official, Firtash's lawyers, Giuliani associates Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, were unable to convince Attorney General William Barr to intervene in the Firtash case. The alleged scheme, one former U.S. official said, was stunning in its audacity.
"Think of it this way," said the official, who has deep knowledge of Ukraine's politics and Firtash's history. "You have the president's personal lawyer trying to get the president's official lawyer, the attorney general, to get the Justice Department to drop charges against an oligarch supported by Russia. That's what was happening."
"Firtash is at dead center of the greatest corruption operation in Ukraine's history," said a former senior U.S. diplomat who served in the region. "He managed the flow of natural gas from Russia to Ukraine and beyond and it kept Ukraine dependent on Russia's gas supplies."
Anders Aslund, a former Swedish diplomat who has studied Ukraine's economy for years, said Firtash is more of a purveyor of bribes than a proper businessman. "He has essentially been used by the Russians to buy political power in Ukraine," said Aslund. "He's the person who has spent the most money on behalf of the Kremlin on Ukraine's politicians."
In 2013, as the Obama administration was pushing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine, federal prosecutors in Chicago indicted Firtash, charging him with a scheme to bribe Indian officials to obtain a lucrative mining deal to sell titanium to Boeing for the 787 Dreamliner. He was arrested in Vienna in March 2014, and released on $174 million bail and has been contesting his extradition to the U.S. ever since.
The $174 million bail, said to be the largest in Austrian history, was paid by the Russian billionaire Vasily Anisimov, who is also under U.S. sanctions.
Richard Grenell, Trump’s inexplicable pick for the Director of National Intelligence, has less than zero experience in intelligence or national security. He had even less experience in diplomacy when Trump named him as the Ambassador to Berlin. What Grenell does have however, are shady connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, who are connected to the Russian mob, and the Kremlin. And this is the man that Trump's wants to trust with the entire treasure trove of Amercan intelligence and classified information.
In interviews, Lev Parnas described a meeting he and Rudy had in London where they met two associates of indicted Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, one of whom was on his legal team. The Washington Post reported on that meeting, and a Firtash lawyer confirmed that a meeting with Giuliani happened. Parnas said he was in the meeting, and that Giuliani used it to try to get material from the oligarch that would bolster his attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump.
Firtash is wanted in this country on multiple felony corruption and bribery charges. DOJ prosecutors say Firtash is an "upper-echelon associate" of Russian Organized Crime.
"Firtash is at dead center of the greatest corruption operation in Ukraine's history," said a former senior U.S. diplomat who served in the region. "He managed the flow of natural gas from Russia to Ukraine and beyond and it kept Ukraine dependent on Russia's gas supplies."
After the meeting, two of Giuliani’s allies joined Firtash’s legal team. Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova began representing Firtash in the summer of 2019, and worked to score political gifts for Trump from Firtash. Parnas said they also tried to leverage their Trumpworld connections to help Firtash.
“During the situation that was going on with the Firtash case, Victoria called Ric Grenell because he was the ambassador to Germany and Vienna was in the same orbit there,” Parnas said. “She basically asked him, if he sees any pressure coming from DOJ to extradite Firtash, if he could let us know. She told me that Grenell said he would.”
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As it stands now, practically anyone, and anything connected to Trump is now under investigation. His inauguration, his Trump crime organization, his fake charity foundation, his fraudulent taxes, his tainted campaign, and his illegitimate presidency, are all under investigation. Most Americans already knew that Trump was totally unfit, and unqualified to be president, but I don't think anything prepared us for an unmitigated disaster of this magnitude. Trump's presidency has been such an unprecedented, and unimaginable debacle, that it can only be defined as a miracle. Because it cannot be explained with logic, reasoning or science.
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Russia’s oligarchs put their wealth and power at Putin’s disposal, or they don’t remain oligarchs for long. This requirement is not lost on Deripaska. “I don’t separate myself from the state,” Deripaska told the Financial Times in 2007. “I have no other interests.” A 2006 U.S. diplomatic cable described him as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.” Working for Deripaska, meant Manafort was working for Putin. Deripaska hired Manafort for $10 million a year, and Manafort worked to advance Russian interests in Ukraine, Georgia, and Montenegro.
The question now is why would Manafort continue to lie for Trump? Why would Manafort, who has a law degree from Georgetown and years of experience around white-collar crime, behave like this? What incentive does he have to spend most or all of his remaining years in prison rather than betray Trump? One way to make sense of his behavior is the possibility that Manafort is keeping his mouth shut because he’s afraid of being killed.
That speculation might sound hyperbolic, but there is plenty of evidence to support it. In February, a video appeared on YouTube showing Manafort’s Russian employer, Deripaska, on his yacht with a Belarusian escort named Anastasia Vashukevich. In the video, from August 2016, Deripaska could be seen speaking with a high-ranking Kremlin official. The video was such a source of embarrassment to Moscow that it fought to have it removed from YouTube. Vashukevich, who was then in a Thai jail after having been arrested there for prostitution, announced that she had heard Deripaska describe a plot to interfere in the election and that she has 16 hours’ worth of audio recordings from the yacht to support her charges. In a letter to America authorities, her associate wrote, “We risk our lives very much.”
Vashukevich’s name has disappeared from the news media. In all probability, either the FBI or Russian intelligence has gotten to her. Whatever has happened to her, her testimony suggests both that Russia is still hiding secrets about its role in Trump’s election and that someone who knows Deripaska well believes he would and could kill her for violating his confidence.
Russia murders people routinely, at home and abroad. In the nine months after Trump’s election, nine Russian officials were murdered or died mysteriously. At least one was suspected to have been a likely source of information for the British agent Steele. The attorney for the firm that hired Steele told the Senate last August, “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.”
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Trump's own people informed him of an outbreak in Wuhan China as far back as February, but he refused to listen to his own intelligence agencies. The same way he refused to listen to them when they warned him about Russian cryber espionage and interference in our elections. He completely ignored them.
Trump has repeatedly lied when he claims that nobody could have predicted something like the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But as usual, Trump's lies are basic, and easily debunked. Government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and they went unheeded..
U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout Dec, Jan, and Feb for the National Security Council, and the White House..
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Trump fired Alex Azar shortly there after because he knew too much.
Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those briefings is anyone's guess. But the safe bet would be that he did not bother to read them at all. Which makes his failure even more unconscionable..
It's clear that Trump's indifference and inaction, constitutes a criminal dereliction of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. Amercan lives have been needlessly lost as a direct consequence of his moral ineptitude and sociopathic behavior, and for that, he must be held accountable...
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I think America needs to have a long conversation about Trump and his crime family's close business relationships with Jyna.
Trump and his crime family have many lucrative business deals with China. Trump's products are manufactured in China. And Ivanka has conveniently received more than 30 new trademark deals in China since Trump became president. This is what happens when you have a president who from day one was compromised by greed and his own self-serving interests.
The Trumps are the landlord to one of China’s top state-owned banks, which has occupied the 20th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan since 2008. The bank’s lease is worth close to $2 million annually, according to industry estimates and a bank filing.
And despite Trump's rhetoric about American manufacturing, assembly-line workers in China still produce blouses, shoes and handbags for the clothing line created by Ivanka. Trump’s business interest in China is long-standing. He began applying for trademarks there in 2005, and in 2012, the Trump Hotel Collection opened an office in Shanghai, its first in Asia.
Trump business relationships with China are among the main examples plaintiffs in multiple court cases have cited in allegations that Trump is violating the Constitution’s “emoluments clause” by accepting payments from foreign governments.
Two of the Trump Organization’s foreign partners — developers in Dubai and Indonesia, each building residential complexes that include a Trump golf course — have announced new partnerships with state-run Chinese companies. On June 10 2018, Dubai’s Damac Properties announced that the state-run China State Construction Engineering Corp. had been awarded a contract to build roads and infrastructure at the new Akoya Oxygen. Trump will be paid to operate a golf course there, his second in the area, and paid for the use of his name.
In May 2018, Trump’s partner in Indonesia — MNC Corp. — announced that it had signed a construction contract with another state-run Chinese company, the Metallurgical Corporation of China, for its planned Lido City development. Plans for that project, in a mountainous area of West Java, include a Trump-branded golf.
Days later, Trump announced his support for Chinese-backed telecommunications firm ZTE, a departure from his previously aggressive stance toward Chinese industry that prompted ethical experts to question whether the two actions were related. But of course they were related. This is Don the con we're talking about.
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As far back as 2015, Trump has been connected to documented acts of violence, with perpetrators claiming that he was even their inspiration. In fact, dozens of people enacted violence in Trump’s name in the years before the Capitol attack, according to a 2020 report from ABC News.
In 2016, a white man told officers “Donald Trump will fix them” while being arrested for threatening his Black neighbors with a knife. That same year, a Florida man threatened to burn down a house next to his because a Muslim family purchased it, claiming that Trump’s Muslim ban made it a reason for “concern.” Then there are the more widely known examples, like Cesar Sayoc, who mailed 16 inoperative pipe bombs to Democratic leaders and referred to Trump as a “surrogate father”; and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 that left 23 dead, where the shooter’s manifesto parroted Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants.
October 23, 2015: After repeatedly being interrupted by protesters at a campaign rally in Miami, Trump warned he’ll “be a little more violent” next time when addressing protesters. “See, the first group, I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!” he said. On video, the pro-immigration protesters could be seen being forcibly dragged out of the campaign event.
January 23, 2016: At a campaign rally in Iowa, Trump, in describing the loyalty of his supporters, notoriously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
March 9, 2016: A Trump supporter punched a Black male protester being escorted out of a Trump campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Trump supporter was recorded on video saying he enjoyed “knocking the he// out of that big mouth” and “Yes, he deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to ki// him.”
Two days after the assault, Trump said such attacks on protesters were “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.” Trump called the protesters “very violent,” though multiple news outlets at the time reported that there were no documented cases of protesters inciting violence against Trump supporters.
March 2016; Demonstrators interrupted Trump at a rally in St. Louis, Missouri. As they were being escorted out of the venue, Trump bemoaned the fact that there were no longer "consequences" to protesting and insisted the "country has to toughen up."
“You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?" he explained.
October 18, 2018: At a rally in Montana, Trump celebrated Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte, who body-slammed a reporter in May 2017, telling the crowd, “Any guy who can do a body-slam ... he’s my guy.”
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A person as profoundly ignorant and divorced from reality as Trump, should never be placed into a position of power or leadership. Especially when the safety, health, and lives of others are at stake..
It's no secret that Trump hates it whenever anyone tries to tell him the truth. And over the last 3 years, he fired all of the most qualified and experienced people within his cabinet and administration. He's now left with an unqualified staff of C and D list sycophants, grifters, nincompoops, scallywags, and the most unprincipled neophytes ever assembled. These yes men will say and do anything in order to avoid the wrath of the orange bully's ire.
President Obama left Trump with a global health infrastructure within White House national security council, and in typical Trump fashion, he got rid of it simply because he didn't understand it, and didn't care enough to even try to understand it.
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On July 23, 2019, Trump said this: "I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President."😲
This is clearly a man who sees himself as a dictator. Since his campaign, Trump has been trying to tell us that he doesn't believe in democracy or our Constitution. He said it when he bragged about shooting someone on 5th Ave. He said it when he bragged about falling in love with the most despotic dictator in modern history.
June 15 2018
Trump praises Kim Jung Un ' control over his people.
"He's the head of the country," Trump said of Kim during a Fox interview.
"And I mean he's the strong head. Don't let anyone think anything different."
"He speaks and his people sit up at attention," Trump added. "I want my people to do the same."
Sept 30 2018
Trump confesses the love he has for his muse, Kim Jung Un, during a rally.
"I like him, he likes me. I guess that’s okay. Am I allowed to say that?” Trump said.
“And then we fell in love, okay” he said. “No really. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic.. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism, followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia
“The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.”
― Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Founders placed articles of impeachment in the Constitution for the purpose of protecting our democracy. A democracy that Trump clearly has no respect for, and is trying to tear apart.
Article II, Section 4, says the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
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The January 27 transcript of the phone call with Mexican President, Peña Nieto, came seven days after Trump entered office. Peña Nieto has insisted publicly his country will not pay for the wall's construction, but Trump begged him to stop making that claim.😄
Trump: "You cannot say that to the press," Trump said on the phone call. "The press is going to go with that and I cannot live with that. You cannot say that to the press because I cannot negotiate under those circumstances."
Trump said he was willing to say publicly that he and Mexican authorities would continue to negotiate over the wall's payment, which he said "means it will come out in the wash and that is OK."
But Trump continued to plead with Peña Nieto to stop saying to the media that Mexico would never pay for any wall.
Trump" "You cannot say anymore that the United States is going to pay for the wall," he said. "I am just going to say that we are working it out. Believe it or not, this is the least important thing that we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important talk about."
😂😂
Trump told many lies during the campaign, but the wall was one of his biggest lies. Now he is desperately looking for someone to come and bail him out, and lead him out of the corn maze of lies he created. He first tried to get the President of Mexico to bail him out. Now he's trying to get the American taxpayers to bail him out. Well that's a negative Ghost Rider.....the pattern is full.
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"I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution."
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”
“Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion, reminded soldiers that ‘TheNazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.”
"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."
--Marine Corps General James Mattis,
June 3, 2020
Semper Fidelis - Always Faithful
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Nothing good has ever resulted from anything that Trump has ever touched or been involved with. He is void of any goodwill or human decency. Trump is a purely toxic, insidious and malevolent being, who constitutes a vile and malignant affliction on this country.
And now tyranny and fascism are on the march in America.
Make no mistake, this election is a choice between Trump and tyranny, or America.
MAKE A DECISION....
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked a question as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. In the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, a lady asked Dr. Franklin: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic....if you can keep it.”
So...will we keep are constitutional republic, or will we lose it, and see it replaced with a monarchy? Will we still have a democracy, or will we be ruled by a tyrant without boundaries? These are the questions that will be on the ballot box in 2020. Because Trump and Republicans are telling us that we can no longer keep it. They are basically giving the Constitution, and the American people the middle finger. It is my sincere hope, that we as a people, return that middle finger to them on election day 2020. 💙
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We already know that Trump hates it whenever anyone tries to tell him the truth. That's why he has fired all of the most qualified and experienced people within his cabinet and administration. He's now left with an unqualified staff of C and D list sycophants, grifters, nincompoops, scallywags, and the most unprincipled neophytes ever assembled. These people will not tell him the truth. They will instead tell him what he wants to hear. And what he wants to hear are lies and false narratives.
Trump has lost all credibility with the American people the same way he lost credibility with American banks a long time ago. Trump's words have been weighed and measured, and have been found wanting......consistently.
It's times like this when America needs, and misses, the calm, collective, intuitive, informative, honest, and reassuring words of President Obama.
Our current president believes that windmills cause cancer. Let that sink in for a moment.
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If Trump and republicans withhold witnesses and evidence that are directly connected to what Trump is being accused of, it will be clear to the world that the Senate trial is an egregious sham. It will go down as the biggest cover-up in American history.
90 minutes after Trump’s phone call, the call he used to bribe the President of Ukraine into opening up a fabricated investigation on the Bidens, Michael Duffey, a Trump-appointed senior official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sent this July 25 email to Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker and other Trump administration officials.
"Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration's plan to review assistance to Ukraine, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional [Department of Defense] obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process."
"Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction."
Sept 9,
The whistleblower's complaint is delivered to the House intel committee. Trump now realizes that he's been busted, and the JIG IS UP!!!😲
SEPT. 11
Two days after the House intel committee is notified of the whistle-blower complaint and opens an investigation, Trump reverses course and releases the hold on the military aid after withholding it for 55 days.
Michael Duffey's email to OMB Pentagon Comptroller Elaine McCusker on Sept 11, informing her that Ukrainian funds will finally be released.
Duffey: "I will be issuing an apportionment this evening to immediately release all USAI funds for obligation. I will alert you as soon as I have signed the apportionment. Thank you."
McCusker: "Copy...what happened? Thanks
Duffey: "Still waiting on my staff to send me apportionment. Hoping to sign tonight yet. Glad to have this behind us."
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Imagine that you and a partner have been in a 20 year life or death struggle with a common enemy. A fight where you have both bled together. And then one day, your partner decides to enter into peace talks with your common enemy, but decides to exclude you from the negotiations. Your partner then signs a peace agreement with this terrorist organization, that doesn't include you at all. It doesn't even mention you. That's exactly what Trump did to the Afghan army, the Afghan government, and the Afghan people.
After Trump had cut the legs out from under the Afghan government and rendered it a paper tiger, it is no wonder that when those serving in the Afghan army and police were asked to fight, most said, "No, thanks."
Once the agreement was signed, the fate of the Afghan government was signed, sealed and delivered - the Taliban had practically won the war. There was no way that the government could possibly survive.
And why would anyone think that cleaning up a 20 year debacle would be easy or pretty? Especially in a country like Afghanistan, and especially after the deal that Trump made.
Name one thing about Afghanistan that has ever been easy, pretty, or smooth.
So far, the US and it's partners have evacuated about 105,000 people since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban entered Kabul. That's an outstanding number considering the chaotic situation on the ground there.
Keep it up President Biden.👍👍
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Prosecutors say that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns and the candidates’ governments.”
How can Trump say that he doesn't know Parnas, when there are soooo many pictures and videos of then together?
Parnas was a Trump loyalist, and was working for Trump alongside Rudy for more than a year, and now all of a sudden, Trump doesn't know him, and republicans are attacking him? Their attacks against Parnas become even more dubious whenever we see all the pictures of him hanging out at Mar-a-Lago and Trump's hotel with Rudy, Trump, McCarthy, Meadows, Graham, Pence, Eric and Don Jr, Kellyanne, Sarah Sanders, and the list goes on and on. Parnas was a permanent fixture at Trump's properties.
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Trying to limit the number of people who vote, is THE most un-American thing I've ever heard of.
So far, the only proof we have of someone trying to change election votes, is Trump himself. He used made-up allegations of voter fraud, in an attempt to engage in REAL voter fraud.
Trump begged Georgia's secretary of state to overturn the election results in an astounding hourlong phone call. Trump offered up a smorgasbord of lies and false claims about voter fraud and repeatedly berated state officials for not violating the constitutional on his behalf.
The phone call featured Trump, days before he is set to leave office, pleading with Raffensperger to alter the vote total and launching into a tirade of farcical conspiracy theories about the election. Trump even suggested that Raffensperger, who is a Republican, may face criminal consequences should he refuse to intervene in accordance with his wishes.
"So look," Trump told Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state." 😂😅
Raffensperger and his office's general counsel, Ryan Germany, pushed back against Trump's claims and said President-elect Joe Biden's victory of about 12,000 votes was accurate.
"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated." 😂
Translation: Trump wanted the Secretary of State for Georgia to illegally overturn the election in his favor.
Raffensperger responded, "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was also present on the call.
Meadows at one point suggested that the secretary of state's office and Trump's team find a path forward to resolve the dispute that did not involve the courts. Raffensperger said he did not believe there was one.
Translation: Trump and Meadows tried to violate the constitution and the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
Trump also brought up a flurry of debunked conspiracy theories.
Raffensperger said Trump was being misled by claims on social media.
"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media is that people can say anything," he said.
"I know this phone call is going nowhere other than ultimately, you know — look, ultimately I win, okay?" Trump said. "Because you guys are so wrong. ... You've treated the population of Georgia so badly."
Democrats in and out of Georgia were swift to respond to the tape. Adam Schiff stated that "Trump's contempt for democracy is laid bare."
"Once again. On tape," Schiff said, referring to Trump's impeachment. "Pressuring an election official to 'find' the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, And another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not."
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On Aug. 7, 1974, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., House Minority Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, R-Pa., made it clear to Nixon that he faced all-but-certain impeachment, conviction, and removal from office in connection with the Watergate scandal...
Nixon announced his resignation the next day, effective at noon on Aug 9, 1974.
In his 2006 book "Conservatives Without Conscience," former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean wrote that the Capitol Hill trio "traveled to the White House to tell Nixon it was time to resign."
In his 1988 autobiography, Goldwater wrote that after hearing their grim assessment, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished."
This was back when the Republican party still had at least a modicum of dignity, decency, integrity, and a sense of right and wrong. Today, thanks to Trump, Moscow Mitch, Graham, Nunes, Jordan, Barr, Meadows, and others, the wholesale corruption of the GOP is now complete.
The Republican Party is now led by a kleptocratic crime boss who ruled over the most scandal-ridden administration in history. Nixon’s administration may have been riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party was still a somewhat normal party, that still played by the rules, so Nixon was forced to resign. But not anymore. Those days are long gone.
The corruption we see in the Republican party today can be defined as institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.
Donald is now the grotesque face of the rot within the party itself. And it reeks of corruption, paranoia, fasc.ism, wild conspiracy theories, rac.ism and other types of hostility toward entire groups. Trump is no different than his authoritarian counterparts abroad: immoral, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving demagogic obedience and protection from the party, and knee-deep in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of authoritarian regimes..
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Trump begged Georgia's secretary of state to overturn the election results in an astounding hourlong phone call. Trump offered up a smorgasbord of lies and false claims about voter fraud and repeatedly berated state officials for not violating the constitutional on his behalf.
The phone call featured Trump, days before he is set to leave office, pleading with Raffensperger to alter the vote total and launching into a tirade of farcical conspiracy theories about the election. Trump even suggested that Raffensperger, who is a Republican, may face criminal consequences should he refuse to intervene in accordance with his wishes.
"So look," Trump told Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state." 😂😅
Raffensperger and his office's general counsel, Ryan Germany, pushed back against Trump's claims and said President-elect Joe Biden's victory of about 12,000 votes was accurate.
"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated." 😂
Translation: Trump wanted the Secretary of State for Georgia to illegally overturn the election in his favor.
Raffensperger responded, "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was also present on the call.
Meadows at one point suggested that the secretary of state's office and Trump's team find a path forward to resolve the dispute that did not involve the courts. Raffensperger said he did not believe there was one.
Translation: Trump and Meadows tried to violate the constitution and the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
Trump also brought up a flurry of debunked conspiracy theories.
Raffensperger said Trump was being misled by claims on social media.
"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media is that people can say anything," he said.
"I know this phone call is going nowhere other than ultimately, you know — look, ultimately I win, okay?" Trump said. "Because you guys are so wrong. ... You've treated the population of Georgia so badly."
Democrats in and out of Georgia were swift to respond to the tape. Adam Schiff stated that "Trump's contempt for democracy is laid bare."
"Once again. On tape," Schiff said, referring to Trump's impeachment. "Pressuring an election official to 'find' the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, And another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not."
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The GOP will never recover from Trump . it's pretty much a wrap, just like Trump University and his fake charity foundation. And republicans in Congress will not be able to blame Trump. They will have no one but themselves to blame. It's very similar to the fable of "The Scorpion and the Frog." Republicans knew all along exactly who and what Trump is.
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a river. It's too treacherous to cross, so the scorpion nicely asks the frog to carry him across on its back. This makes the frog a little suspicious. It asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.” That sound reasoning relaxes the frog's nerves. So he allows the scorpion to climb aboard and they shove off across the flowing water.
Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.
"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little dance the drownings frog's back.
"I could not help myself, said the scorpion, It is my nature."
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
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The FBI's "Operation Ghost Stories" was a counter-espionage operation against Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova, a Russian spy couple who were part of the Illegals Program, a network of Russian sleeper agents who were arrested in 2010.
Donald Heathfield and Tracy Lee Ann Foley had been living for two decades in Canada and then in Europe before they ever set foot in the U.S. to start spying for Russia here. We now know that the FBI was on to them as spies as soon as they got here. In the 80s, these two Russian spies stole their new names and identities from deceased Canadian kids from the 1960s, and under those identities, they started a fake life in Toronto.
Although their spy life started in Canada, ultimately, the goal of this spy operation, the reason they were deployed by Russian intelligence in the first place was not to spy on Canada, but instead, to spy on the United States.
The couple lived in Toronto through the ’80s and ’90s. In the ’90s, Donald
Heathfield and Tracy Lee Ann Foley, had two sons. The spy couple spoke both French and English at home with their boys. They didn’t speak Russian at home with their boys even though they were from Russia and were native Russian speakers. Their sons had no idea that their parents were Russian at all.
In 2010, when a federal indictment against these spies was unsealed, the details of what this spy couple was assigned to do here in the U.S. by their handlers in Russia was revealed. The FBI’s investigation has revealed that a network of illegals is now living and operating in the U.S. in the service of one primary long-term goal, to become sufficiently Americanized such that they can gather information about the U.S. for Russia, and can successfully recruit sources
who are in or are able to infiltrate U.S. policy making circles.
They were getting information out of specific individuals in America, and reporting back to Moscow, individuals like a person who had worked in Congress as a legislative counsel, an economics professor who had contacts in Congress and with Washington policymakers. Donald Heathfield reported to Moscow that he had established contact with a former high ranking U.S. government national security official. Heathfield also made contact with a U.S. official working on nuclear weapons at a U.S. government research facility.
The FBI was watching them and collecting intel on their operations for that whole 10 year period. The FBI during that time had also put microphones inside the spy’s house. They had no clue how much the FBI was on to them, and that their house was bugged. The FBI had secretly gone inside their house on multiple occasions. They had photographed their notes and letters. The FBI also got into a safe deposit box they used to send encrypted messages.
The lead case agent for Donald Heathfield and Tracy Lee Ann Foley at the FBI, the FBI agent who led this covert FBI operation that monitored those two Russian spies for years, all the surveillance these trained Russian spies were unable to detect, all the intelligence collected on them from right under their noses, and breaking their codes, was an FBI agent named Peter Strzok.
He actually won a medal for his work on that case. But he also worked on other Russian spy rings in the U.S. and Chinese spy rings in the U.S. Over more than 20 years at the FBI, he rose to become the senior agent on all espionage cases at the Washington field office at the FBI. Ultimately, he rose from there to become the head of the counterintelligence division for the whole FBI.
Strzok served four years in the Army, 101st Airborne, and then joined the FBI, where he spent 22 years working to protect this country’s national security. Peter Strzok is a man who has served and protected America faithfully and honorably. Now I see why a traitor like Trump attacks him. Let's place Peter Strzok's service to this country on a balance scale, up against Trump's service to this country, and let's see which individual comes up wanting.
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There is more than enough evidence to charge Trump with criminal negligent homicide of at least 100 thousand Americans.
In proving negligent homicide, the prosecution only needs to establish that the defendants knew the risks associated with their actions.
1. The defendant was aware of the risks associated with the actions that led to the other person’s death. ✔
2. The defendant acted, or failed to act appropriately in a dangerous situation, and that action or inaction caused the victim’s death. ✔
3. There is a direct link between the defendant’s conduct and the victim’s death. ✔
Trump has admitted to downplaying the virus from the very beginning. He has been telling lies to the American since January, and with lethal consequences.
Trump told Woodward he's been minimizing the threat posed by the outbreak.
Trump: "I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down," Trump said.
Trump during February 7 phone call with Bob Woodward:
"It goes through air, Bob. That's always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don't have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than your, you know, your even your strenuous flus. This is 5% vs 1%. You know so, this is deadly stuff."
Three weeks after that call, Trump told this lie to the public during a February 26 White House press conference:
Trump: "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."
March 19: Trump again talked with Woodward. He acknowledged emerging evidence that a wide age range can be gravely impacted by the coronavirus.
Trump: "Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday some startling facts came out. It's not just old -- it's plenty of young people," he said.
May 6: Following a concerted push to reopen schools beginning in late April, Trump lied again when he suggested that children aren't susceptible to the coronavirus.
Trump: "We realize how strong children are, right? Their immune system is maybe a little bit different. Maybe it's just a little bit stronger, or maybe it's a lot stronger," he said.
Aug. 5: Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported over 240,000 documented COVID-19 cases in children at this point, Trump told this lie during an interview:
Trump: "If you look at children, children are almost -- and I would almost say definitely -- but almost immune from this disease." He adds "They don't have a problem. They just don't have a problem."
Trump knew that what he was telling the American was NOT true. And at least 100 thousand American citizens have died because of his lies.
Allan Lichtman, the historian known for accurately predicting presidential elections, said that Trump’s downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic will be remembered as “the greatest dereliction of duty” in presidential history..
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History will record Aug. 15, 2021, as the date that the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban retook control over that troubled and war-torn country. But the real date that the Taliban's victory was assured is Feb. 29, 2020, the day the Trump administration signed what it characterized as a "peace" deal with the Taliban. Once this agreement was signed - the tragic collapse we witnessed was inevitable.
Imagine that you and a partner have been in a 20 year life or death struggle with a common enemy. A fight where you have both bled together. And then one day, your partner decides to enter into peace talks with your common enemy, but decides to exclude you from the negotiations. Your partner then signs a peace agreement with this terrorist organization, that doesn't include you at all. It doesn't even mention you. That's exactly what Trump did to the Afghan army, the Afghan government, and the Afghan people.
After Trump had cut the legs out from under the Afghan government and rendered it a paper tiger, it is no wonder that when those serving in the Afghan army and police were asked to fight, most said, "No, thanks."
Once the agreement was signed, the fate of the Afghan government was signed, sealed and delivered - the Taliban had practically won the war. There was no way that the government could possibly survive.
And why would anyone think that cleaning up a 20 year debacle would be easy or pretty? Especially in a country like Afghanistan, and especially after the deal that Trump made.
Name one thing about Afghanistan that has ever been easy, pretty, or smooth.
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Simply claiming that there's proof of mass voter fraud, is NOT proof of mass voter fraud. You actually have to provide the evidence.
You can't just tell me that Bigfoot is real, and expect me to simply take your word for it. You're going to have to bring me Bigfoot.
Trying to limit the number of people who vote, is THE most un-American thing I've ever heard of.
So far, the only proof we have of someone trying to change election votes, is Trump himself. He used made-up allegations of voter fraud, in an attempt to engage in REAL voter fraud.
Trump begged Georgia's secretary of state to overturn the election results in an astounding hourlong phone call. Trump offered up a smorgasbord of lies and false claims about voter fraud and repeatedly berated state officials for not violating the constitutional on his behalf.
The phone call featured Trump, days before he is set to leave office, pleading with Raffensperger to alter the vote total and launching into a tirade of farcical conspiracy theories about the election. Trump even suggested that Raffensperger, who is a Republican, may face criminal consequences should he refuse to intervene in accordance with his wishes.
"So look," Trump told Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state." 😂😅
Raffensperger and his office's general counsel, Ryan Germany, pushed back against Trump's claims and said President-elect Joe Biden's victory of about 12,000 votes was accurate.
"The people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry," Trump said in the call. "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated." 😂
Translation: Trump wanted the Secretary of State for Georgia to illegally overturn the election in his favor.
Raffensperger responded, "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was also present on the call.
Meadows at one point suggested that the secretary of state's office and Trump's team find a path forward to resolve the dispute that did not involve the courts. Raffensperger said he did not believe there was one.
Translation: Trump and Meadows tried to violate the constitution and the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
Trump also brought up a flurry of debunked conspiracy theories.
Raffensperger said Trump was being misled by claims on social media.
"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media is that people can say anything," he said.
"I know this phone call is going nowhere other than ultimately, you know — look, ultimately I win, okay?" Trump said. "Because you guys are so wrong. ... You've treated the population of Georgia so badly."
Democrats in and out of Georgia were swift to respond to the tape. Adam Schiff stated that "Trump's contempt for democracy is laid bare."
"Once again. On tape," Schiff said, referring to Trump's impeachment. "Pressuring an election official to 'find' the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, And another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not."
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June 3, 2016, Don Jr receives this email at 10:36 AM, from Rob Goldstone.
"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting."
"The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."
"This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin" Goldstone wrote.
Don Jr. agrees to hold the meeting at Trump Tower, and sets the date for June 9.
On June 7, 2016, just days before the Trump Tower meeting, Trump announced a “major speech” he claimed would reveal damaging information about Hillary. "I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” Trump said. “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting."
On June 9, 2016, a meeting was held in Trump Tower between three senior members of the Donald Trump presidential campaign – Don Jr., Kushner, and Manafort – and at least five other people, including Russian Russian agents.
On July 27 2016, on national tv, Trump invites Russia to meddle in our elections.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Later that same day, the 12 Russian operatives indicted in the special counsel investigation, launched the 1st cyber attack against the DNC.
Translation: Trump is guilty of treason.
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History will record Aug. 15, 2021, as the date that the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban retook control over that troubled and war-torn country. But the real date that the Taliban's victory was assured is Feb. 29, 2020, the day the Trump administration signed what it characterized as a "peace" deal with the Taliban. Once this agreement was signed - the tragic collapse we witnessed was inevitable.
Imagine that you and a partner have been in a 20 year life or death struggle with a common enemy. A fight where you have both bled together. And then one day, your partner decides to enter into peace talks with your common enemy, but decides to exclude you from the negotiations. Your partner then signs a peace agreement with this terrorist organization, that doesn't include you at all. It doesn't even mention you. That's exactly what Trump did to the Afghan army, the Afghan government, and the Afghan people.
After Trump had cut the legs out from under the Afghan government and rendered it a paper tiger, it is no wonder that when those serving in the Afghan army and police were asked to fight, most said, "No, thanks."
Once the agreement was signed, the fate of the Afghan government was signed, sealed and delivered - the Taliban had practically won the war. There was no way that the government could possibly survive.
And why would anyone think that cleaning up a 20 year debacle would be easy or pretty? Especially in a country like Afghanistan, and especially after the deal that Trump made.
Name one thing about Afghanistan that has ever been easy, pretty, or smooth.
So far, the US and it's partners have evacuated about 105,000 people since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban entered Kabul. That's an outstanding number considering the chaotic situation on the ground there.
Keep it up President Biden.👍👍
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Just imagine if a career criminal and con-man became president, and he systematically dismantled the DoJ, and then turned it into his personal tool to use as a get out of jail free card for himself and his criminal cohorts. It's the kind of thing we thought only happened in 3rd world banana republics, controlled by despots
Ex-Trump campaign official Rick Gates testified under oath in Roger Stone's trial that he was in the presidential limousine with Trump, and he'd heard Stone tell Trump about the WikiLeaks release of hacked DNC emails before the dump happened — a direct contradiction of what Trump told Mueller in his written testimony.
In his under oath testimony, Gates described how he'd seen Trump get a phone call from Stone in summer 2016, and after Trump hung up, told Gates "more information would be coming" regarding WikiLeaks..
Going back as far as April 2016, Gates said, Stone told him that information would be released by WikiLeaks that could be helpful to Trump’s campaign. He reiterated this the following month. All this was before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated publicly on June 12, 2016, that he had pending releases related to Hillary Clinton.
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails from the DNC — emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.
After that, Gates testified, the top levels of the Trump campaign were very interested in what Stone knew about WikiLeaks. Gates said Manafort asked him to follow up with Stone to try to learn more about WikiLeaks’s plans. And Gates said that Manafort indicated he would update others on the campaign, “including the candidate” — Donald Trump.
Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, shortly after the DNC email releases began, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.”
October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre, PA: "This just came out," Trump said. "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks."
October 12, 2016 in Ocala, FL: "This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable," Trump said. "It tells you the inner heart, you gotta read it."
October 13, 2016 in Cincinnati, OH: "It's been amazing what's coming out on WikiLeaks."
October 31, 2016 in Warren, MI: "Another one came in today," Trump said. "This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove."
November 4, 2016 in Wilmington, OH: "Getting off the plane, they were just announcing new WikiLeaks, and I wanted to stay there, but I didn't want to keep you waiting," said Trump. "Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks."
Trump on April 11, 2019, after Julian Assange is arrested:
"I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing, and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange. I know nothing really about him. That's not my deal in life." 😲
Has the world ever seen a bigger liar than Trump? I THINK NOT.....
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Trump’s campaign chairman Manafort, shared polling data on the 2016 election with a Russian man linked to Moscow’s intelligence agencies. Manafort was also accused of covering up other meetings and contacts with the Russian, an elusive man named Konstantin Kilimnik who worked for Manafort on election campaigns for pro-Kremlin politicians in eastern Europe.
Kilimnik, 48, trained at a university connected to Russia’s military intelligence agency, formerly known as the GRU, which spearheaded the Kremlin’s effort to disrupt the the election. US Intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian operation was ordered by Putin to help Trump’s campaign.
Mueller has also said that Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy on the Trump campaign, described Kilimnik as “a former Russian intelligence officer with the GRU”
Manafort’s attorneys did not deny that Manafort gave Kilimnik the data, instead stating that he had not lied about it but was merely “unable to recall specific details prior to having his recollection refreshed”. The attorneys also confirmed that Manafort had met Kilimnik in Madrid, claiming he “had not initially remembered” the meeting but recalled it when confronted with records showing the two were in the Spanish capital at the same time. LOL!!!😂 So Manafort tried to pretend that he didn't remember taking a flight across the Atlantic Ocean to meet up with a Russian agent in Spain in order to pass polling data on to him.😂😂
It was previously known that Kilimnik and Manafort had met twice during 2016 in the US. The date of the Madrid meeting was not stated, but a source familiar with Manafort’s team said it was in early 2017 after Trump had entered office.
Trump said he knew “nothing” about his then-campaign chief Paul Manafort sharing polling data with a Russian spy during the 2016 presidential campaign. 😂 Sure Donnie....we believe you.😄
The disclosure that Manafort had given Kilimnik polling data is the strongest piece of public evidence that a high-ranking Trump campaign official may have been coordinating with Russians in an illegal effort to get Trump elected. Such data could have been used by Russia as part of a broad-ranging scheme, which involved bogus social media accounts, to manipulate public opinion in Trump’s favor.
Mueller has charged that Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort for years, tried with Manafort to tamper with potential witnesses against Manafort.
Mueller has alleged that Kilimnik — who remains at large — has ties to “a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”
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If we take a step back, and remember a few of our past American Presidents, like Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, FDR, Reagan, Carter, and Obama, it's easy to see that Trump has nothing in common with any of them. Traitor Trump does not possess any of the traits that made them decent men, and great leaders.
A few of our past presidents, whether you agree with them politically or not, came from poor or modest backgrounds: Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton, Truman, Carter, Obama, all came from nothing. Trump comes from a family of wealthy, self-serving, entitled cowards, who have never served or sacrificed anything for anyone. Cowardness, greed, hubris, and contempt for the law runs through Trump's veins. He despises everything that made some of our past presidents great leaders.
Trump despises John McCain, because McCain was everything that he's not. Trump will attack veterans, PoWs, our intelligence agencies, or anyone that swears and oath to serve a cause greater than themselves. He will attack them because the concept or idea, of serving someone, or something, other than himself is inconceivable.
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How Democracies Die.
“There’s no English equivalent for silovik. It doesn’t translate succinctly because to create something as Machiavellian as a silovik requires both the KGB and the GRU, and then a shift from communism to capitalism, followed by a gear-grinding reverse into despotism.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia..
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine.
Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended, by political parties and organized citizens but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.
This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence) and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.
Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored.
But if other countries’ experiences teach us that that polarization can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
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Putin's plot against America, which was to help his puppet Trump get elected began in 2014. Thousands of miles away, in a drab office building in St Petersburg, Russia, a fake newsroom was under construction with its own graphics, data analysis, search engine optimisation, IT and finance departments. Its mission: ”information warfare against the US..
We now know from the Mueller report, that what followed was a successful attack on the most powerful democracy in the world. It involved stolen identities, fake social media accounts, rallies organised from afar, US citizens (Trump cultists) duped into doing Moscow’s bidding..
In his first criminal charges related to election meddling, Mueller indicted 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies of an elaborate effort to disrupt the 2016 elections with a covert trolling campaign, aimed at helping Trump get elected.
The Russian offensive began in 2014 with an aim to “sow discord” and evolved into a concerted attempt to help Trump. Some of it relied on old-fashioned boots on the ground. Two operatives, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, travelled as tourists through at least nine states over about two weeks in June 2014 to collect intelligence for their operations. They prepared “evacuation scenarios” in case their cover was blown.
This was combined with exploiting the anonymous, borderless world of social media, where agents of chaos thrive. The Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” based in nondescript offices at 55 Savushkina Street St Petersburg, was operating through Russian shell companies, the agency employed hundreds of people, ranging from creators of fictitious personae to technical and administrative support.
Its specialists were divided into day shifts and night shifts to fit with the appropriate US time zones. The agency also circulated lists of US holidays so that specialists could be active accordingly.
Russians posed as political and social active Americans. They created social media pages and groups, and bought political adverts such as “Donald wants to defeat terrorism ... Hillary wants to sponsor it”. They relied on identity theft, using the social security numbers, home addresses and birth dates of Americans without their knowledge. They set up fake bank accounts linked to PayPal accounts.
They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Clinton, and to denigrate other candidates such as Cruz and Rubio. In June 2016, after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, the Russians began to organise pro-Trump rallies, recruiting and paying unwitting (Trump cultists) Americans. At a time when Trump supporters were chanting “Lock her up!”, one was asked to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform at a rally in Florida, while another was asked to build a cage on a flatbed truck. On 22 September, Russians created and bought Facebook ads for a series of “Miners for Trump" rallies in Pennsylvania.
Today Trump still refuses to criticize Putin, or even acknowledge that Moscow meddled in our elections. His refusal to do so is either motivated by fear, or a conscientious and wilful betrayal of his oath of office, and the betrayal of America.
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Twitter has shut down multiple accounts that it says were operated by a white supremacist group posing as liberal groups encouraging violence..
A white supremacist group created a fake Twitter account, posed as the Antifa movement and called for violence during the ongoing protests sweeping the nation, Twitter said.
“Tonight’s the night comrades," the group tweeted on Sunday. “Tonight we say ‘f--k the city’ and we move into residential areas... the white hoods... and we take what’s ours.”
Twitter said the white supremacist group Identity Evropa used one fake account, @Antifa_US, to call for violence in majority white suburbs, in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement.
"This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules" the company said.
Twitter said it has also targeted other fake accounts run by Identity Evropa. The company said the accounts posted hateful tweets targeting race, religion and sexual orientation.
Twitter has seen a wave of fake accounts spreading false information about the ongoing protests in recent days.
Trump and his supporters have claimed, without evidence, that Antifa is behind the violence seen in some of the protests nationwide.
In an internal FBI situation report, the FBI’s Washington Field Office found no intel evidence indicating Antifa involvement or presence in the violence that occurred on May 31 during the D.C.-area protests. That same day, Trump announced on Twitter that he would designate “Antifa” a terrorist organization, even though antifa is not an organized group.
But not surprisingly, the report did warn that individuals from a far-right social media group had called for far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents, and use automatic weapons against protesters. A Department of Homeland Security intelligence note warned law-enforcement officials that a white supremacist channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram encouraged its followers to incite violence to start a race war during the protests.
Antifa, short for anti-facist, poses a threat to a devout fascist like Trump, so it only makes sense that Trump would want to go after them. Adolf did the same thing to opponents of his fascist regime. It's only natural that a fascist would view any anti-facist group has his enemy.
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Trump tricks his kool-aid guzzling cult into believing that he's going to be tough on China, he then turns around and drops to his knees at President Xi's feet, sobbing, blubbering, groveling, and pleading with him to do whatever he can to help him get reelected. 😂
This is the same so called tuff guy that used brute force on peaceful protesting American citizens just so he could have a 5 minute photo op. Utterly disgusting
Make no mistake, most republicans on Capitol Hill are fully aware of exactly who and what Trump is. They know that Trump is an existential threat to America, to our Constitution, and to our democratic institutions. Trump is a criminal minded, narcissistic sociopath who never puts anyone or anything before himself, unless he's physically using that person or thing as a shield. What most of us would call treason or betrayal, Trump calls it " looking out for the only thing that matters" himself.
Trump has always been a self-absorbed extreme narcissist. Every decision Trump has ever made in his entire life, before and and since he became president, has been based solely on his own best interests. Ego rules supremely in a narcissist’s life. And What motivates Trump is whatever fuels his ego, things like power, control, adulations, praises, cruelty to others, and personal monetary gain.
Another way that an extreme narcissist like Trump energizes his ego is through playing the role of the victim. The goal of Trump's deception is to make you believe that he suffers more than you, or anyone for that matter.
Trump is incredibly adept at the game of manipulation, especially when it comes to his gullible and cultish base. So instead of taking responsibility for his actions, and the consequences that results from them, he tries to make others feel responsible for his plight. Because In the eyes of an extreme narcissist like Trump, their actions and behavior are always right and totally justified.
Trump and republicans continue to rage against the Constitution in their ongoing war with our democratic republic. They have made it abundantly clear that we must vote them out of office in order for our democracy to survive.
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Trump has repeatedly lied when he claims that nobody could have predicted something like the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But as usual, Trump's lies are basic, and easily debunked. Government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and went unheeded.
U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout December for policymakers, National Security Council, and the White House..
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield.
Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those briefings is anyone's guess.
On Jan. 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first briefed Trump on the threat of the virus in a phone call. Trump made his first public comments about the virus on Jan. 22, saying he was not concerned about a pandemic and that "we have it totally under control."
On Jan. 29, economic adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House in a memo addressed to the NSC that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage.
On Jan. 30, Azar warned Trump in a call that the virus could become a pandemic. Trump dismissed Azar as alarmist and rejected the idea of criticizing China. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health emergency.
On Feb. 5, senators urged Trump in a briefing to take the virus more seriously and asked if additional funds were necessary. The administration made no requests at the time for emergency funding.
On Feb. 14, a memo was drafted by health officials in coordination with the NSC that recommended the targeted use of quarantine and isolation measures. Officials planned to present Trump with the memo when he returned from India on Feb. 25, but the meeting was canceled.
On Feb. 21, the White House coronavirus task force conducted a mock exercise of the pandemic. The group concluded that the U.S. would need to implement aggressive social distancing, even if it caused mass disruption to the economy and American lives.
It's clear that Trump's indifference and inaction, constitutes a criminal dereliction of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. Amercan lives have been needlessly lost as a direct consequence of his moral ineptitude and sociopathic behavior, and for that, he must be held accountable..
Meanwhile, Trump's is continuing his mission of gaslighting to oblivion, the feeble and atrophied minds of his cultists, with lies about how great of a job he's doing. While in the real world, America now has more than 400k confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections, and more than 20k deaths. Because of Trump, America has the absolute WORST failed national response to the coronavirus in the world.
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Trump’s campaign chairman Manafort, shared polling data on the 2016 election with a Russian man linked to Moscow’s intelligence agencies. Manafort was also accused of covering up other meetings and contacts with the Russian, an elusive man named Konstantin Kilimnik who worked for Manafort on election campaigns for pro-Kremlin politicians in eastern Europe.
Kilimnik, 48, trained at a university connected to Russia’s military intelligence agency, formerly known as the GRU, which spearheaded the Kremlin’s effort to disrupt the the election. US Intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian operation was ordered by Putin to help Trump’s campaign.
Mueller has also said that Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy on the Trump campaign, described Kilimnik as “a former Russian intelligence officer with the GRU”
Manafort’s attorneys did not deny that Manafort gave Kilimnik the data, instead stating that he had not lied about it but was merely “unable to recall specific details prior to having his recollection refreshed”. The attorneys also confirmed that Manafort had met Kilimnik in Madrid, claiming he “had not initially remembered” the meeting but recalled it when confronted with records showing the two were in the Spanish capital at the same time. LOL!!!😂 So Manafort tried to pretend that he didn't remember taking a flight across the Atlantic Ocean to meet up with a Russian agent in Spain in order to pass polling data on to him.😂😂
It was previously known that Kilimnik and Manafort had met twice during 2016 in the US. The date of the Madrid meeting was not stated, but a source familiar with Manafort’s team said it was in early 2017 after Trump had entered office.
Trump said he knew “nothing” about his then-campaign chief Paul Manafort sharing polling data with a Russian spy during the 2016 presidential campaign. 😂 Sure Donnie....we believe you.😄
The disclosure that Manafort had given Kilimnik polling data is the strongest piece of public evidence that a high-ranking Trump campaign official may have been coordinating with Russians in an illegal effort to get Trump elected. Such data could have been used by Russia as part of a broad-ranging scheme, which involved bogus social media accounts, to manipulate public opinion in Trump’s favor.
Mueller has charged that Kilimnik, who worked for Manafort for years, tried with Manafort to tamper with potential witnesses against Manafort.
Mueller has alleged that Kilimnik — who remains at large — has ties to “a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”
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Twitter has shut down multiple accounts that it says were operated by a white supremacist group posing as liberal groups encouraging violence.
A white supremacist group created a fake Twitter account, posed as the Antifa movement and called for violence during the ongoing protests sweeping the nation, Twitter said.
“Tonight’s the night comrades," the group tweeted on Sunday. “Tonight we say ‘f--k the city’ and we move into residential areas... the white hoods... and we take what’s ours.”
Twitter said the white supremacist group Identity Evropa used one fake account, @Antifa_US, to call for violence in majority white suburbs, in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement.
"This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules" the company said.
Twitter said it has also targeted other fake accounts run by Identity Evropa. The company said the accounts posted hateful tweets targeting race, religion and sexual orientation.
Twitter has seen a wave of fake accounts spreading false information about the ongoing protests in recent days.
Trump and his supporters have claimed, without evidence, that Antifa is behind the violence seen in some of the protests nationwide.
In an internal FBI situation report, the FBI’s Washington Field Office found no intel evidence indicating Antifa involvement or presence in the violence that occurred on May 31 during the D.C.-area protests. That same day, Trump announced on Twitter that he would designate “Antifa” a terrorist organization, even though antifa is not an organized group.
But not surprisingly, the report did warn that individuals from a far-right social media group had called for far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents, and use automatic weapons against protesters. A Department of Homeland Security intelligence note warned law-enforcement officials that a white supremacist channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram encouraged its followers to incite violence to start a race war during the protests
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Naomi Ogle
LMAO!!😄 You do realize that this is all public information.
The 5 stages of Trumpism:
1. It's a total lie, never happened, fake news.
2. Ok, so it happened, but it's not a big deal.
3. Ok, so it might be a big deal, but it isn't illegal.
4. Ok, so it's illegal, but but but Hillary and Obama, something unintelligible, so it's okay.
5. WHATEVER LIBBY!! YOU'RE JUST A SORE LOSER. MAGA!!!!
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Trump has repeatedly lied when he claims that nobody could have predicted something like the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But as usual, Trump's lies are basic, and easily debunked. Government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and went unheeded.
U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple briefings about the report throughout December for policymakers, National Security Council, and the White House.
On Dec. 31, China publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield.
Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those is anyone's guess. Either way, his indifference and inaction constitutes a criminal dereliction of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. Amercan lives have been needlessly lost as a direct consequence of his moral ineptitude and sociopathic behavior, and for that, he must be held accountable..
Meanwhile, Trump's is continuing his mission of gaslighting to oblivion, the feeble and atrophied minds of his cultists, with lies about how great of a job he's doing. While in the real world, America now has more than 400k confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections, and more than 15k deaths. Because of Trump, America has the absolute WORST failed national response to the coronavirus in the world. I sh¡t thee nay.
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Trump's administration buried a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places. The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day." Once again Trump is dismissive of scientific facts because they get in the way of the BS he's trying to sell to the country. Instead of sharing this vital information which can literally save lives, he hides it.
Trump's cult has bought into his commitment to willful ignorance. Trump feeds them lies and misinformation on a daily basis, and they accept it without questioning the validity of anything he says. And at the same time, they will say that they are protesting for their "freedom." What they don't realize is that no man or woman can ever truly be free without factual information....without the truth. Without the facts and the truth, they are nothing more than tools for the person feeding them lies.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
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What we've learned so far from Bolton’s book is that obstruction of justice is not the exception in Trump's White House, it's the #1 rule. And apparently, it only gets worse from there. Asking countries like Russia, China and Ukraine for quid pro quos to help him get reelected seems to be the #2 rule.
Trump unwittingly admitted to obstruction of justice in his May 2017 interview with Lester Holt. In the interview, Trump said he fired James Comey because he wouldn't shutdown the Russia investigation. I say unwittingly because Trump doesn't believe he obstructed justice, because he doesn't actually believe in the concept of justice to begin with. And he certainly doesn't believe in law & order.
Trump: "I do solemnly swear, that I will faithfully desecrate the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, pervert, offend, and violate the Constitution of the United States. So help me Putin...OR Gyna....if you're listening."
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Putin's plot against America, which was to help his puppet Trump get elected began in 2014. Thousands of miles away, in a drab office building in St Petersburg Russia, a fake newsroom was under construction with its own graphics, data analysis, search engine optimisation, IT and finance departments. Its mission: ”information warfare against the US..
We now know from the Mueller report, that what followed was a successful attack on the most powerful democracy in the world. It involved stolen identities, fake social media accounts, rallies organised from afar, Americans (Trump cultists) duped into doing Moscow’s bidding..
In his first criminal charges related to election meddling, Mueller indicted 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies of an elaborate effort to disrupt the 2016 elections with a covert trolling campaign, aimed at helping Trump get elected.
The Russian offensive began in 2014 with an aim to “sow discord” and evolved into a concerted attempt to help Trump. Some of it relied on old-fashioned boots on the ground. Two operatives, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, travelled as tourists through at least nine states over about two weeks in June 2014 to collect intelligence for their operations. They prepared “evacuation scenarios” in case their cover was blown.
This was combined with exploiting the anonymous, borderless world of social media, where agents of chaos thrive. The Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” based in nondescript offices at 55 Savushkina Street St Petersburg, was operating through Russian shell companies, the agency employed hundreds of people, ranging from creators of fictitious personae to technical and administrative support.
Its specialists were divided into day shifts and night shifts to fit with the appropriate US time zones. The agency also circulated lists of US holidays so that specialists could be active accordingly.
Russians posed as political and social active Americans. They created social media pages and groups, and bought political adverts such as “Donald wants to defeat terrorism ... Hillary wants to sponsor it”. They relied on identity theft, using the social security numbers, home addresses and birth dates of Americans without their knowledge. They set up fake bank accounts linked to PayPal accounts.
They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Clinton, and to denigrate other candidates such as Cruz and Rubio. In June 2016, after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, the Russians began to organise pro-Trump rallies, recruiting and paying unwitting (Trump cultists) Americans. At a time when Trump supporters were chanting “Lock her up!”, one was asked to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform at a rally in Florida, while another was asked to build a cage on a flatbed truck. On 22 September, Russians created and bought Facebook ads for a series of “Miners for Trump" rallies in Pennsylvania..
Today Trump still refuses to criticize Putin, or even acknowledge that Moscow meddled in our elections. His refusal to do so is either motivated by fear, or a conscientious and wilful betrayal of his oath of office, and the betrayal of America.
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Trump's golfing has cost American taxpayers at least 102 million dollars so far.
Trump: "I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf, believe me."
Trump has taken 175 trips to play golf since being in office. And all of his golfing trips were to his own golf resorts except one.
Trump: "I'm not gonna play much golf, because there's a lot of work to be done."
At this time in his presidency, President Obama had only played 70 rounds of golf, compared to Trump, who has now played almost 200 rounds of golf.
So far, American taxpayers have paid 81 million for Trump play on his golf course in FL,
17 million for Trump to play on his golf courses in NJ, 1 million for Trump to play on his golf courses in Los Angeles, and 3 million for Trump to play on his golf course in Scotland.
Of the 70 golf trips that President Obama took at this point in his presidency, 48 of them were to golf courses on military bases, which clearly saves taxpayers money, and it benefits the military bases as well.
Since Trump the grifter and con-man, only visits his golf resorts, he's pocketing millions of taxpayer dollars from accommodations, lodging, and rental fees. On Average, Trump has golfed every 4.9 days as president. At this pace, he will spend almost 600 days golfing if he serves 2 terms, compared with President Obama, who spent 302 days golfing in 2 terms.
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One of the most revered leaders of my beloved Marine Corps denounced Trump for his divisive and authoritarian actions against American citizens, and against our Constitution.
Semper Fi..
"I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution."
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”
“Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.”
"When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."
--Marine General James Mattis
June 3, 2020
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@SCUMCHRIST888
In May of 2018, when China's President Xi Jinping, leader of the COMMUNIST PARTY of China, changed the country’s constitution to allow him to stay in power indefinitely, Trump, who admires dictators, said he thought the Chinese president’s power grab was a good idea, and he had dreams of doing the same thing.
Trump: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
On January 6, Trump tried to do exactly that. He failed.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked a question as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. In the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, a lady asked Dr. Franklin: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic....if you can keep it.”
We almost lost our democratic republic on January 6.
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It's almost as if the Founders were clairvoyant when they placed articles of impeachment into the Constitution. They clearly had envisioned someone like Trump in America's future. Someone who would say that as president, he can do whatever he wants..
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.”
― DaShanne Stokes
“Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may”
― Daniel Webste
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
If what Trump has done isn't wrong, then that means that nothing is wrong. if Trump isn't impeachable, then that means that no president will ever be impeachable, no matter what they do. And that will spell the end of our democracy, our Constitution, and our republic. It will be as if we never fought and won a war of independence against a King.
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They say that "the fish rots from the head." This is true, and so does a nation. And the insidious rot that has gripped this nation, can be traced directly to the occupant in the Oval Office.
"I think my rhetoric brings people together," Donald said that last year, just four days after Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old MAGA supporter posted an anti-immigrant message online and then opened.fire at a Walmart in El Paso, TX, taking the lives of 22 people, and injuring dozens of others.
A nationwide review conducted has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.
After a La.tino gas station attendant in Gainesville, Florida, was suddenly pu.nched in the head by a MAGA supporter, the victim could be heard on surveillance camera recounting the attacker’s own words: “He said, ‘This is for Trump.'" Charges were filed but the victim stopped pursuing them.
When police questioned a Washington state man about his threats to murder a local immigrant, the suspect told police he wanted the victim to "get out of my country," adding, "That’s why I like Trump."
Reviewing police reports and court records, the review found that in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed DJT in the midst or immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant's violent or threatening behavior.
The review could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of Obama or Bush.
The 54 cases identified are remarkable in that a link to DJT is captured in court documents and police statements, under the penalty of perjury or contempt. These links are not speculative – they are documented in official records. And in the majority of cases, it was the perpetrators themselves who invoked DJT's name in connection with their case, not anyone else.
Trump and his followers are exactly what Voltaire was talking about when he said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
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So nearly everyone in Trump's inner circle and campaign, were in some way, in contact with, or secretly meeting with the Russians, and they ALL lied about it. There were more than 100 contacts between people in Trump's campaign, and Russians. Enough said.
Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said the plan by chief White House adviser Jared Kushner who discussed plans with the Russan Ambassador, to establish a secret communication channel with the Kremlin — using Russian facilities — without any monitoring by the U.S. was “off the map” and like nothing he has seen in his lifetime. “What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or an appropriate idea?” Hayden stated.
What Kushner tried to do is exactly what American traitors have done in the past when they've decided to start working for the Russian government. It's basically what Aldrich Ames did in 1985, when he walked into the Soviet Union Embassy in DC, and turned over highly classified information to the Russians.
Trump and his people were warned by Obama, Sally Yates, and the FBI, that Russia was actively trying to infiltrate Trump's inner circle. And what does Trump do? He fired Comey, and Sally Yates, the very people who had warned him about what the Russians were up to. Even after Trump had been warned, his people were still holding secret meetings with the Russians, and they all lied about it......every single person lied about their meetings with the Russians. And then on the day after Trump fired Comey, the guy who was in charge of the FBI, the agency charged with catching Russian spies, Trump invites the Russian foreign minister, and Russia's Ambassador to the Oval Office, and brags about firing the head of the FBI. Let all of that sink in for a minute.
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Flynn's crimes and betrayal have been well reported and documented. In a now infamous video, Flynn is seen applauding and toasting Putin, Trump's benefactor, and a known tyrant. The video shows that the Dec. 10, 2015 Moscow dinner Flynn attended was swarming with ex-russian spies, Putin's cronies and oligarchs.
In the video of a December 2015 dinner celebrating the 10th birthday of Putin's propaganda network RT at a Moscow hotel, Putin and a host of Russian luminaries toasted the state-controlled news channel that U.S. intelligence calls a Kremlin mouthpiece. And next to Putin at the head table, in the seat of honor, was Michael Flynn, who would later become Trump's national security adviser, was already advising Trump's campaign when he was being paid $45,000 by Putin to speak at the gala.
"It is not a coincidence that Flynn was placed next to Putin," said Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador in Moscow "Flynn was considered a close Trump adviser. Why else would they want him there?"
Sergey Ivanov, then Putin's chief of staff, sat directly across the table from Flynn. A former KGB general who at one point ran KGB operations in Africa, he has also served as Russian defense minister and deputy prime minister. Ivanov had been under U.S. and European sanctions for a year and a half by the date of the dinner.
Next to Ivanov was Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, but more importantly his de facto national security adviser, say U.S. officials. Flanking Putin on his right, two seats from Flynn, sat Alexey Gromov, Putin's deputy chief of staff. U.S. intelligence considers Gromov to be Putin's head propagandist. According to the January 6 Intelligence Community report on Russian interference in the U.S. election. He too was on U.S. and European sanctions the day of the dinner.
After Putin got up to make his speech, his place at Flynn's side was taken by Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief. A personal friend of Putin, she worked in one of his presidential campaigns before being chosen by Gromov to head RT. U.S. intelligence assessment of RT paints Simonyan as the lead person, along with Gromov, engaging in information warfare against U.S. policies. She is described as closely tied to, controlled by the Kremlin.
Beyond the head table, Russia's oligarchs filled many of the seats. Like Viktor Vekselberg, whose billions are in oil and aluminum and who is a business partner of Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the owner of the world's largest collection of Faberge eggs.
Flynn had already been a frequent guest on RT in the months prior to the dinner. When Putin finished his speech that night, Flynn was among the first to leap to his feet and offer a standing ovation.
Like Trump, Flynn proudly betrayed his country, and they both did it for nothing more than greed.
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The notion that Trump was actually concerned about corruption in Ukraine, or corruption in general, is laughable. He even had the audacity to call himself the "law & order" president.
Trump is not only the most corrupt president in American history, he's the most corrupt president imaginable. If someone had told me years ago that we would ever have a president this immoral, unethical, deceitful, and sociopathic, I would have laughed. Well....I'm not laughing now. 😔 Nixon's ghost can finally rest in peace, because Nixon is no longer the most corrupt president in American history.
November of last year, Trump was ordered by a judge to pay $2 m in damages for illegally using funds intended for charity to boost his 2016 presidential election campaign.
Trump had to admit to personally misusing the money, according to the New York’s attorney general office, despite having previously denied any wrongdoing. The fine adds to several other investigations into allegations that he is using public office for self-enrichment.
The lawsuit last year states that Trump, and his three money grubbing useless children - Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric - broke campaign finance laws in 2016 by using Trump Foundation’s tax-exempt status “as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests.
Trump and his talentless children, had violated their fiduciary duties as officers and directors of the now-shuttered Trump Foundation. As a result of that failure, charitable dollars — consistently and over many years — often benefited Trump rather than the causes he repeatedly claimed he supports.
There was “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation – including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” the suit claimed.
In the agreements, Trump admitted to misusing funds from the foundation, which he dissolved last year, including to pay for a portrait himself that cost $10,000. He also agreed to pay back $11,525 he spent on sports memorabilia and champagne at a charity gala.
Trump also directed the foundation to use money for charity to buy a Tim Tebow helmet for himself, and to settle a couple of lawsuits.
Trump also admitted in the agreements to directing that $100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over an 80-foot flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort, instead of paying the expense out of his own pocket..
In addition, the charity foundation paid $158,000 to resolve a lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course, and $5,000 for ads promoting Trump’s hotels in the programs for charitable events. Trump admitted these transactions were also improper.
But let's be honest, what Trump did wasn't just improper, it was downright criminal and reprehensible..
Jan, 2016
Trump: "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy."
Jan 9, 2016
"Now, I’ll tell you, I’m good at that – so, you know, I’ve always taken in money,” he said at a rally in Iowa. “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy – I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?
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Why isn't Trump, the draft dodging champion, here in America on Memorial Day weekend honoring our fallen? Oh that's right, Trump has no respect for our veterans, PoWs, our fallen, or their gold star family members. Trump didn't even bother to visit Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day last year.
Trump didn't even bother to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which is a presidential tradition. Just imagine if Obama and skipped Arlington or laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.😲 And just the day before, Trump didn't bother to attend the commemoration ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France while he was there. He said the rain prevented him from paying his respects to the American soldiers who died in WW1, however, the rain didn't prevent other world leaders from attending the ceremony.
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Sean Hannahs
Steve Bannon, Trump’s ex chief political strategist, once said proudly: “I am a Leninist.” Bannon said that Lenin wanted to destroy the Russian state (which was true) and that he had the same goals for Amerca. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment" Bannon said.
From the look of Trump’s time in White House, Bannon installed a bevy of Leninist political tactics that could have come straight from the Bolshevik leader’s playbook.
Two days after Lenin seized power in Russia a century ago, he began an assault on the free press – and his successors in the USSR did not let up for the next 70 years. Putin is literally following in Lenin's footsteps.
Three days after Trump’s inauguration Bannon told the NYT: “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen … I want you to quote this. "The media here is the opposition party." This was the beginning of Trump's war on the free press, which is a must for any demagogue.
Since information from the press can undermine a dictator's spell over his cultists, they will often attack and demonized the free press. They will usually claim that the media can't be trusted. They have even called out for violence against news outlets that oppose them, claiming that the press is part of a deep state conspiracy against them, or claiming that leading newspapers were simply personally out to get him. No dictator can survive in a country that has a free press. This fact was no lost on Lenin, and neither is that fact lost on Trump. The truth has been, and will always be, Trump's nemesis
Bannon helped to creat the hate-filled language of alt-right politics, which is decidedly Leninist in tone. Above all, Lenin needed to invent enemies he had to be seen to defeat. In post- revolutionary Russia it was the kulaks – richer farmers who were “sucking the blood” of poorer peasants, bankers who were war profiteering, the “elite” (a word Lenin used frequently) who treated the majority with contempt. He despised so-called “experts” who claimed a monopoly of knowledge. He often said that a worker with five days’ training could run a government department. He scapegoated opponents and labelled them “enemies of the people”.
Lenin abolished the existing legal system and started afresh. Within a few weeks his regime closed down the first freely elected parliament in Russia’s history – and the Soviets never allowed another one. It would be wrong to assume that the next step for Trump is the abolition of Congress, or the construction of labour camps. But the unprecedented war by tweet between the administration and the judiciary over the president’s executive order on immigration has real echoes of Bannon’s revolutionary hero...
Lenin would very likely have identified 2017 as a revolutionary moment. He matters today not because of his flawed and bloody answers, but because he was asking questions similar to those we are asking today. In his quest for power, Lenin promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex issues. He lied unashamedly. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything; the ends justified the means. Lenin was the godfather of post-truth politics. Powerful people have learned depressing lessons from him.
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Sean Hannahs
A cult of personality, or a cult leader like Trump, arises when an individual uses the media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, counterfeit patriotism, demonstrations and rallies, to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery,
praise.
The term came to prominence in 1956, in Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev criticized the lionization and idealization of Stalin, and by implication, his Communist sidekick Mao Zedong. Mao's cult of personality, like Stalin’s, portrayed him as larger-than-life and endowed with unrivaled wisdom. Cults of personality fell out of favor in the 1950s after Khrushchev's speech, but Trump's handler Putin, has revived the practice, guiding a wave of nostalgia for Stalin as he advocates for Russian nationalism and anti-West sentiment.
A main feature of Stalinism was its cult of personality. Whereas Lenin had claimed that the workers suffered from false consciousness and therefore needed a vanguard party to guide them, Stalin maintained that the Communist Party itself suffered from false consciousness
and therefore needed an all-wise leader—Stalin himself—to guide it. The resulting cult of personality portrayed Stalin as a universal genius in every subject, from linguistics to genetics.
The best modern-day example of a cult of personality comes to us from North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un, the despotic dictator that Trump admires so much.
Kim Jong-un's cult of personality paints him as a man who can do anything. According to this propaganda, he can climb tall mountains, even though like Trump, he is horrendously obese, and in terrible physical shape. Like Trump, Kim Jong Un brags about being able to make strong and intelligent military decisions, despite neither one of them having a military background. And when architects design new apartments and shops, he is given credit for doing so.
"This man is a genius at every level! Why can't we all be like him? He must be something special, and we are clearly not. Ergo, let's listen to him since he knows best."
-- Trump supporters
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JimJones was the leader of the Peoples Temple, a ministry of his own devising that convinced hundreds of Americans to move to his compound, known as Jonestown, in Guyana.
"He was a master of manipulation, but you saw him with this dark hair, the sunglasses, and the way that he spoke -- he was a great orator -- and it moved you, it inspired you because he was so passionate. And so I was just enthralled," said former Peoples Temple member Leslie Wagner-Wilson.
As time went on, former members said Jones became more extreme.
In 1974, Jones leased more than 3,800 acres of isolated land in the jungle from the Guyanese government. By 1978, nearly 1,000 followers had moved to the Guyana compound. Having been forced to give up their passports and money upon arrival, some former members said they were cut off from the outside world.
"Everyone was forbidden from reading anything because Jones said they were liars," said former member Deborah Layton. "He called it FAKE NEWS…. Jones coined fake news. Anything that was written about him he said was fake. It was all to ruin his name and his cause, and what he stood for."
A cult environment like "Qanon" and Trumpism discourages critical thinking, making it hard to voice doubts, when everyone around you is displaying dogmatic faith and obedience to their leader. A process of indoctrination is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion, or thought reform, commonly called "brainwashing." The resulting internal conflict, known as cognitive dissonance, keeps them trapped, as each compromise makes it more painful to admit that you've been deceived.
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So Ron Johnson is openly defending the insurrection. Why doesn't that surprise me? In 2018, Ron Johnson was one of the Republican lawmakers who flew to Moscow to celebrate the 4th of July there. 😲 I know right, that's what I said.
Last year, four lawmakers who make up the Democratic half of the Gang of Eight, the group of congressional and intelligence committee leaders who are privy to top-secret intelligence, demanded a briefing for all members of Congress focused on foreign interference in the 2020 election, based on their assertions that lawmakers are being targeted by those meddling efforts. They also urged Trump to publicly reveal additional information about the nature of the foreign-influence campaign. Intelligence officials told House lawmakers that the Russians were seeking to boost Trump in the 2020 campaign.
The public version of the letter was vague about those threats, but the classified addendum to the letter specifically names Sen Ron Johnson’s investigation as a vehicle for “laundering” Russian propaganda for the foreign influence campaign aimed at denigrating Biden.
In 2018, eight republican lawmakers celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow: Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who led the delegation, along with Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Steve Daines of Montana, North Dakota’s John Hoeven, Jerry Moran of Kansas, South Dakota’s John Thune, and Rep. Kay Granger of the 12th District of Texas. The dubious reason they gave for the trip was “engagement." It's the same tired excuse Sen Rand Paul routinely provides to justify his own shadowy meetings with our enemies.
The group met with a number of Russian agents, and key Russians officials, including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and former Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak—the two who 14 months earlier were photographed by the Russian press yukking it up with Trump in the Oval Office, the day after Trump fired Comey for daring to do his job of investigating Russian interference in our elections. To this day, we have no way of knowing what was discussed during their visit to Moscow, as the media was barred from the closed-door meetings, much to the delight of the “gloating” Russians.
Ron Johnson has been the most outspoken when defending Trump. So much so that during an interview on Meet the Press in October 2019, he announced that he doesn’t trust the FBI or the CIA—a clear admission that he does however trust the GRU and his Russian comrades. Today, the eight republicans that came back from Russia, show all the signs of a Russian GRU sleeper cell. It would explain why they're all regurgitating Russian GRU propaganda to the American people..
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Trump's meeting with Putin in Helsinki will forever be remembered as "The Great Betrayal."
History has proven that Trump won't hesitate to betray anyone or anything. In the past, Trump has betrayed his wives, his kids, his father, his siblings, his business partners, his employees, contractors, banks, his lawyers, his accomplices, his White House advisers and staff, the country, his oath of office, and last but not least, he betrayed everyone who marched on the Capitol because of the lies he told them.
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This impeachment is not about removing Trump from office, the American people have already done that. This is all about holding him accountable for the events of January 6, and his attempt to take down our Constitution, and our democracy.
Domestic terrorism is defined as, violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
On January 6, the world watched in horror and disgust as Trump's horde of insurrectionists stormed our nation's Capitol.
They said that like 1776, they were leading a revolution. But here's the problem with that, in 1776, this nation fought a revolution to remove a King, Trump's horde led an insurrection in order to insert a King.
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Trump has been violating the Constitution since noon on January 20, 2017. His decision prior to his inauguration to keep ownership and control of his businesses —a move that went against both long-standing historical practice and the advice of career government ethics officials—put him at odds with the Constitution’s original anti-corruption provisions the moment he was sworn in.
Emoluments Clauses, prohibit the president from receiving any profit, gain, or advantage from any foreign or domestic government. Impeachment, as outlined by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 65, is a political remedy for a president’s egregious violations of these prohibitions.
The Framers of the Constitution were very aware of the dangers from foreign influence on any president. This is why they created rules to prevent foreign governments from purchasing undue influence on a sitting President. Essentially buying a sitting President, which is basically what Putin and Saudi Arabia have done withTrump.
The rule prohibits anyone holding any “Office of Profit or Trust under the United States” from receiving any “emolument” from foreign powers. An emolument, for purposes of the Constitution, according to two courts, is any “PROFIT, GAIN, or ADVANTAGE. This rule is what has become known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause, and is located at Article I, Section 9, Clause 8.
The Framers of the Constitution were also worried about undue influence from individual States in the union, and by officials PROFITEERING from federal offices. The Framers were concerned that a powerful state might sway the president’s decision making to its own benefit.
To prevent against these types of abuses, the Framers developed the Domestic Emoluments Clause, at Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, which is a blanket prohibition against the president receiving any sort of advantage from any state government, or PROFITING from the federal government.
Not only have U.S. and foreign governments spent money at properties owned by Trump, but Trump's own political campaign and affiliated political committees have also spent about $16.8 million at his businesses since he launched his 2016 bid, according to an analysis of federal election spending records. Republican political campaigns and PACs have spent just under $1.8 million at Trump-owned businesses so far this year in the 2020 election cycle.
A recent example of Trump's emoluments clause violations came last year in August when a visit from Saudi officials to Trump's Trump International Hotel in NYC helped boost the hotel's quarterly revenue by 13% in 2018's first quarter. The bump came after two straight years of booking declines for the property.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels. A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks..
Fun fact: The emoluments clauses are our country’s original anti-corruption laws. They are written into the document that created our government and defined our system of laws.
At a Cabinet meeting, Trump blamed the backlash and outrage over his attempt to profit from holding the G7 Summit at his Doral resort on “you people with this phony emoluments clause."😲😲
A perfect example of the utter contempt that Trump has for our Constitution, and the rule of law.
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Terrorism is defined as the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
It's being reported that Trump wants to start his own political party to challenge anyone who refused to destroy our Constitution and democracy, and insert him as an American dictator. If he does create his own party, it should immediately be labeled as a terrorist organization. Because that's exactly what it will be.
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Hotcheetojuice
His actions says it, and it speaks volumes.
Trump's abominable budget includes about $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act over a decade.
The new budget includes $844 billion over 10 years in cuts from the “President’s health reform vision,” a stand-in for the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare. There are also more than $150 billion in additional cuts from implementing Medicaid work requirements and other changes to the program, which would result in some people losing coverage if they did not meet the requirements.
Trump’s proposed $4.8-trillion budget for the 2021 fiscal yearmakes his intentions crystal clear: He means to shred the federal safety net for the poor and the sick.
The budget calls for drastic cuts in Social Security and Medicaid benefits, as well as in a program protecting defrauded student loan borrowers. Medicare spending will also be cut.
Trump's budget would also slash food stamp spending by $181 billion. The plan also calls for a steep 8% cut to the Education budget; a 9% cut to the Health and Human Services Budget, including the Centers for Disease Control; and a 26% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency budget. The Interior Department would see a 13% budget cut; the Department of Housing and Urban Development would see a 15% cut; and both the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development would be slashed by 22%.
Trump's budget even calls for an extension to individual tax cuts for the wealthy, set to expire in 2025 through 2035. The individual tax cuts for the wealthy, which were temporary even though the corporate tax cuts were permanent, would cost another $1.4 trillion, according to the plan. Most of the benefits from the tax cuts overwhelmingly flowed to the very rich.
These cuts were presented under the heading, “Restrain spending to protect and respect American taxpayers.” 😂 Who are the taxpayers Trump is talking about? The wealthy, whose take from the 2017 tax cuts won’t be affected one bit.
Trump's budget is all about making the poor, sick, children and elderly pay for the tax cuts for the rich. Trump is going to make the American people pay for the massive freebies he gave to himself, corporations, and his other wealthy welfare queens who colluded with him on passing the tax cut for themselves.
“I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said in 2015.
"We will not be touching your Social Security and Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget,"
Trump tweeted this lie just hours before the White House released his budget that sought deep cuts to both programs.
Trump's budget amounts to another middle finger to American families, and another smash & grab crime spree for him.
Jan, 2016
Trump: "My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy."
Jan 9, 2016
"Now, I’ll tell you, I’m good at that – so, you know, I’ve always taken in money,” he said at a rally in Iowa. “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy – I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?
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Trump and his crime family have too many lucrative business deals with China to be serious about confronting it on anything. Many of Trump's products are manufactured in China. And Ivanka has conveniently received more than 30 new trademark deals in China since Trump became president. This is what happens when you have a president who from day one was compromised by greed and his own self-serving interests.
Chinese government-backed firms are slated to work on parts of two large developments — in Dubai and Indonesia — that will include Trump-branded properties.
The Trumps are the landlord to one of China’s top state-owned banks, which has occupied the 20th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan since 2008. The bank’s lease is worth close to $2 million annually, according to industry estimates and a bank filing.
And despite Trump's rhetoric about American manufacturing, assembly-line workers in China still produce blouses, shoes and handbags for the clothing line created by Ivanka. Trump’s business interest in China is long-standing. He began applying for trademarks there in 2005, and in 2012, the Trump Hotel Collection opened an office in Shanghai, its first in Asia.
Trump is currently on the hook to China for more than 200 million dollars, and the loan is due soon. In 2012, his real estate partner refinanced one of Trump’s most prized NY buildings for $1 billion. The debt included $211 million from the state-owned Bank of China — its the first loan of this kind in the U.S. — and the debt is due in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term.
Whether Trump’s businesses received more loans from state-owned Chinese banks, or other investors with ties to foreign governments is unknown because Trump refuses to release his complete tax returns and other financial records
Trump business relationships with China are among the main examples plaintiffs in multiple court cases have cited in allegations that Trump is violating the Constitution’s “emoluments clause” by accepting payments from foreign governments.
Two of the Trump Organization’s foreign partners — developers in Dubai and Indonesia, each building residential complexes that include a Trump golf course — have announced new partnerships with state-run Chinese companies. On June 10 2018, Dubai’s Damac Properties announced that the state-run China State Construction Engineering Corp. had been awarded a contract to build roads and infrastructure at the new Akoya Oxygen. Trump will be paid to operate a golf course there, his second in the area, and paid for the use of his name.
In May 2018, Trump’s partner in Indonesia — MNC Corp. — announced that it had signed a construction contract with another state-run Chinese company, the Metallurgical Corporation of China, for its planned Lido City development. Plans for that project, in a mountainous area of West Java, include a Trump-branded golf.
Days later, Trump announced his support for Chinese-backed telecommunications firm ZTE, a departure from his previously aggressive stance toward Chinese industry that prompted ethical experts to question whether the two actions were related. But of course they were related. This is Don the con we're talking about.
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Last year during a July ceremony in the Rose Garden to formally sign a bill that will extend the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund through 2092, Trump told a group of more than 60 first responders an outrageous lie when he said "Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there—I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
Trump has told outrageous lies about helping first responders on 9/11 in the past. On the campaign trail on April 18, 2016, in Buffalo NY, he said: " Everyone who helped clear the rubble - and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit."😲
There is no evidence that Trump participated in recovery efforts, there’s also no evidence he spent any time near ground zero in the week following the attack..
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In 2018, 8 republican lawmakers decided to celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow: Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who led the delegation, along with Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Steve Daines of Montana, North Dakota’s John Hoeven, Jerry Moran of Kansas, South Dakota’s John Thune, and Rep. Kay Granger of the 12th District of Texas.
The group celebrated America's Day of independence in Moscow laughing it up with a number of key Russians, including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and former Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak—the two same two who 14 months earlier were photographed by the Russian press laughing it up with Trump in the Oval Office, the day after Comey was fired.
What's worse is that we have no way of knowing what was said during their meetings with Russian agents and officials, because the media was barred from the closed-door meetings, much to the delight of the gloating Russians.
It may be a coincidence that two of the eight republicans who went to Moscow for some vague reason on the Fourth of July are now mouthpieces for the Kremlin. But fortunately for me, I don't believe in coincidences.
These 8 republicans have all the signs of a GOP/GRU Russian sleeper cell. Consider: Eight Republican lawmakers—and, notably, not a single Democrat—journey halfway around the world to spend America's Independence Day with Putin’s coziest cronies. We don’t really know what happens once they get there, but we do know that the Russians are really good at both psy-ops and kompromat.
It would explain why republicans like Johnson, Kennedy and others have been regurgitating Russian propaganda almost word for word.
It’s like the tv series, "The Americans" but with actual Americans.
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All 44 presidents before DT would have been impeached, removed from office, and imprisoned for half of what he has done. A narcissistic sociopath like DT, with no impulse control, who doesn't believe in right or wrong, and believes he's impervious to consequences, is 100% incorrigible. He is completely incapable of being corrected.
On Aug. 7, 1974, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., House Minority Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, R-Pa., made it clear to Nixon that he faced all-but-certain impeachment, conviction, and removal from office in connection with the Watergate scandal...
Nixon announced his resignation the next day, which would be effective at noon on Aug 9, 1974..
In his 2006 book "Conservatives Without Conscience," former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean wrote that the Capitol Hill trio "traveled to the White House to tell Nixon it was time to resign."
In his 1988 autobiography, Goldwater wrote that after hearing their grim assessment, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished."
This was back when the Republican party still had at least a modicum of dignity, decency, integrity, and a sense of right and wrong. Today, thanks to DT, McConnell, McCarthy, Cruz, Graham, Nunes, Jordan, Hawley, Meadows, and others, the wholesale corruption of the GOP is now complete.
The Republican Party is now led by a kleptocratic crime boss who ruled over the most scandal-ridden administration in history. Nixon’s administration may have been riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party was still a somewhat normal party, that still played by the rules, so Nixon was forced to resign. But not anymore. Those days are long gone.
The corruption we see in the Republican party today can be defined as institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.
DT is now the grotesque face of the rot within the party itself. And it reeks of corruption, paranoia, fasc.ism, wild conspiracy theories, rac.ism and other types of hostility toward entire groups. DT is no different than his authoritarian counterparts abroad: immoral, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving demagogic obedience and protection from the party, and knee-deep in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of authoritarian regimes..
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The Saudi Royals have invested a lot of money into Donald's criminal organization, and they expected a return on their investment. Protection being one of the things the Saudis expected in return, and they received that protection from Trump and Jared.
In 2017, Joshua Harris, a private equity billionaire started paying regular visits to the White House. Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, met on multiple occasions with Jared to discuss a possible White House job for Harris.
The job never materialized, but later that year, Apollo lent $184 million to Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper. It was one of the largest loans Kushner Companies received that year.
An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent Kushner’s firm and one of its partners $325 million to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn. That loan was made in the spring of 2017, shortly after Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup’s chief executive, Michael Corbat.
Apollo executives, including Harris, had tens of millions of dollars personally at stake in Trump's massive tax cut for corporations and the most wealthy that was making its way through Washington that year. Citigroup, one of the country’s largest banks, was trying to get the government to relax its oversight of the industry.
Jared also had multiple interactions with potential investors from overseas. Kushner’s firm has sought investments from the Chinese insurer Anbang and from the former prime minister of Qatar. One of the largest investors in Apollo’s real estate trust is the Qatari government’s investment fund, the Qatar Investment Authority.
Kushner’s firm previously sought a $500 million investment from the former head of that Qatari fund for its headquarters at 666 Fifth Ave. That year, Jared's father, Charles Kushner, pressed a Qatari official for the $500 million loan from a government-controlled investment fund. Weeks after Charles Kusher’s request was denied, Jared backed a punishing blockade of Qatar, which was enacted by Saudi Arabia.
Jared's family, which had struggled to get the financing to save their underwater skyscraper at 666 Fifth Ave, were suddenly bailed out by Apollo, which had business ties to the government of Qatar, one of it's largest investors. Two weeks later, Sec of State Pompeo told Saudi Arabia that enough was enough, and the blockade was lifted.
Shortly after Kushner Companies received the loan from Apollo, the private equity firm emerged as a beneficiary of the tax cut package that Trump championed. Trump backed down from his earlier pledge to close a loophole that permits private equity managers to pay taxes on the bulk of their income at rates that are roughly half of ordinary income tax rates. The tax law left the loophole largely intact.
"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
The 9/11hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, they also received funding from Saudi Arabia to plan their attack while they were here in America. But none of that mattered to Trump and Jared. His first trip abroad as President was to Saudi Arabia, so he could do the sword dance, and kiss the rings of his Saudi benefactors.
It was revealed that Trump gave approval for companies to share certain nuclear energy technology with the kingdom without a broader nuclear deal in place.
Congress was furious over Trump’s secret efforts to secure a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia. Congress was rightfully furious when they discovered that the Saudis refused to accept limits preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon.
House Democrats began investigating the administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi after the Oversight and Reform Committee announced it was launching a probe to “determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump administration are in the national security interests of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry approved seven authorizations that let U.S. companies share certain nuclear energy technology with Saudi Arabia.
lawmakers were outraged when they found out they were not told about the approvals, saying the secrecy violated the Atomic Energy Act, which requires that Congress be kept “fully and currently informed” of 123 agreement negotiations.
In 1991, as Trump was teetering on bankruptcy yet AGAIN, and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million.
Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel....Which eventually went under anyway.
In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the UN for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
After Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and Saudi lobbying groups became lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels.
A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of 2018, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to Trump that violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.
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In 2018, 8 republican lawmakers decided to celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow: Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who led the delegation, along with Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Steve Daines of Montana, North Dakota’s John Hoeven, Jerry Moran of Kansas, South Dakota’s John Thune, and Rep. Kay Granger of the 12th District of Texas.
The group celebrated America's Day of independence in Moscow laughing it up with a number of key Russians, including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and former Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak—the two same two who 14 months earlier were photographed by the Russian press laughing it up with Trump in the Oval Office, the day after Comey was fired.
What's worse is that we have no way of knowing what was said during their meetings with Russian agents and officials, because the media was barred from the closed-door meetings, much to the delight of the gloating Russians.
It may be a coincidence that two of the eight republicans who went to Moscow for some vague reason on the Fourth of July are now mouthpieces for the Kremlin. But fortunately for me, I don't believe in coincidences.
These 8 republicans have all the signs of a GOP/GRU Russian sleeper cell. Consider: Eight Republican lawmakers—and, notably, not a single Democrat—journey halfway around the world to spend America's Independence Day with Putin’s coziest cronies. We don’t really know what happens once they get there, but we do know that the Russians are really good at both psy-ops and kompromat.
It would explain why republicans like Johnson, Kennedy and others have been regurgitating Russian propaganda almost word for word.
It’s like the tv series, "The Americans" but with actual Americans.
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Trump sowed the seeds of the BIG LIE even before election day. Deep down, Trump knew that he was going to lose, so like the sociopath that he is, he poisoned the well, and sowed the seeds of anger, doubt, violence, and extremism..
Trump: "If you only count the votes that were for me, I win easily -- by a landslide."
August 17 2020.
Trump: "The only way "WE'RE" going to lose this election, is if it's rigged, remember that."
The election wasn't rigged, the mind's of Trump's followers were rigged..
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On Dec. 29 2016, transition adviser K. T. McFarland, wrote in an email to a colleague that sanctions announced hours before by Obama in retaliation for Russian election meddling were aimed at discrediting Trump’s victory. The sanctions,,she wrote, could also make it much harder for Mr. Trump to ease tensions with Russia, “which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote in the emails.😲
On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”
Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the “Molotov cocktail” was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia.
Trump's inauguration was celebrated jubilantly in Moscow, where Putin supporter Konstantin Rykov hosted an all-night party. Champagne flowed as an interpreter narrated the new U.S. president's speech. In Washington, the Russian Embassy tweeted, "Happy #InaugurationDay2017!" with a photo of people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Amid a busy schedule in Washington, Boris Titov — who was appointed by Putin to serve as a business ombudsman — told a Russian television station that new investment was likely to flow to Russia once the Obama era U.S. sanctions were lifted.
Businesses "are waiting for this signal, and they believe it will soon come," he said..
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The firehose of falsehood, or firehosing, is a Soviet era propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels without regard for truth or consistency This tactic was successfully used by Russia during its annexation of Crimea.
The characteristics that distinguish this technique from Soviet Cold-War era propaganda techniques are a large number of messages and channels, and a "shameless" approach to disseminating falsehoods and contradictory messages. The immediate aim is to confuse, and overwhelm the audience. The "firehose" takes advantage of modern technology, such as the Internet and social media, and recent changes in the way people produce and consume news.
Russia disseminates propaganda using dozens of proxy websites whose connection to RT is "disguised or downplayed. People are also more likely to believe a story when they think many others believe it, especially if those others belong to a group with which they identify. Thus, an army of trolls can influence a person's opinion by creating the false impression that a majority of that person's neighbors support a given view.
Using the firehose model, the Russian government, along with Fox, have had some success in getting people to believe and spread falsehoods and disbelieve truthful reporting.
Although the firehosing technique takes advantage of modern technology, it is informed by the thinking of Lenin.
Lenin once explained that his heated language was "calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth." In his biography of Lenin, historian Victor Sebestyen described him as the "godfather" of "post-truth politics."
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@chrisquinn394
President Obama inherited the worst economy since the great depression. He turned the country and economy around in 8 years. He then passed that strong economy over to Trump. That's a fact that no amount of lies will ever change.
Trump promised 4,5 and 6% GDP growth when he became president. We only saw 2.5% GDP growth during Trump's administration. President Obama on the other hand, hit 4% GDP growth four times during his administration.
President Obama’s last three years of job growth all beat Trump’s best year
Obama Monthly average of Jobs added 2014-2016 = 224,000
Trump Monthly average of Jobs added 2017-2019 = 189,000
President Obama created 1.6 million more jobs than Trump over a three-year period
Trump’s boasts about how many jobs he has added don’t include that he has generated 6.5 million jobs under his Presidency vs. the 8.1 million, OR, 1.6 million fewer than President Obama did under the same timeframe. On average, President Obama created 43,000 more jobs per month than Trump.
While GDP growth crossed over 3% in a few quarters the past three years, on a full year basis, GDP growth hit a high point of only 2.9% in 2018, With it falling back to 2.3% in 2019. This is another example of Trump's gaslighting claim that the economy could grow 4%, 5% or maybe even 6% when he was President.
The best three quarters of growth for Trump have been:
● 3Q 2017 at 3.2%
● 4Q 2017 at 3.5%
● 2Q 2018 at 3.5%
Obama’s best three quarters of growth were:
● 4Q 2011 at 4.7%
● 2Q 2014 at 5.5%
● 3Q 2014 at 5.0%
Just imagine if Trump, the king of debt and bankruptcy, had inherited a great recession like President Obama inherited. Yikes!!😲
Trump is an expert at digging financial holes, but he has never climbed his way out of one. Just ask anyone who has ever done business with him in Atlantic City and NY, or just ask the multiple banks he borrowed money from and never repaid them.
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I think America needs to have a long conversation about Trump and his crime family's close business relationships with Jyna.
Trump and his crime family have many lucrative business deals with China. Trump's products are manufactured in China. And Ivanka has conveniently received more than 30 new trademark deals in China since Trump became president. This is what happens when you have a president who from day one was compromised by greed and his own self-serving interests.
The Trumps are the landlord to one of China’s top state-owned banks, which has occupied the 20th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan since 2008. The bank’s lease is worth close to $2 million annually, according to industry estimates and a bank filing.
And despite Trump's rhetoric about American manufacturing, assembly-line workers in China still produce blouses, shoes and handbags for the clothing line created by Ivanka. Trump’s business interest in China is long-standing. He began applying for trademarks there in 2005, and in 2012, the Trump Hotel Collection opened an office in Shanghai, its first in Asia.
Trump business relationships with China are among the main examples plaintiffs in multiple court cases have cited in allegations that Trump is violating the Constitution’s “emoluments clause” by accepting payments from foreign governments.
Two of the Trump Organization’s foreign partners — developers in Dubai and Indonesia, each building residential complexes that include a Trump golf course — have announced new partnerships with state-run Chinese companies. On June 10 2018, Dubai’s Damac Properties announced that the state-run China State Construction Engineering Corp. had been awarded a contract to build roads and infrastructure at the new Akoya Oxygen. Trump will be paid to operate a golf course there, his second in the area, and paid for the use of his name.
In May 2018, Trump’s partner in Indonesia — MNC Corp. — announced that it had signed a construction contract with another state-run Chinese company, the Metallurgical Corporation of China, for its planned Lido City development. Plans for that project, in a mountainous area of West Java, include a Trump-branded golf.
Days later, Trump announced his support for Chinese-backed telecommunications firm ZTE, a departure from his previously aggressive stance toward Chinese industry that prompted ethical experts to question whether the two actions were related. But of course they were related. This is Don the con we're talking about.
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I know there are some Dems who don't believe Biden should run. I'm not one of those Dems. I really like all of the Dem candidates so far. They each bring a little something different to the table, while at the same time, united together in bringing a sense of normalcy and decency back to the white house, and the country. If this was going to be a normal election, like elections of the past, I would probably support one of the other candidates, but there is nothing normal about the situation the country is in today.
We currently have a demagogue, traitor, and a wannabe dictator in the Oval Office. The way I see it, the best person suited to take down a national disgrace like Trump is Biden. I'll never forget how Joe systematically dismantled Paul Ryan in their VP debate. Ryan came to the debate armed with nothing but lies, and Joe shot everyone down, and he did with a smile on his face. I thought Paul Ryan was going to cry. I have no doubt that he would do the same thing to Trump. I also believe that out of all of the candidates, Joe is the only one with the experience, and knowledge, to be able to walk into the white house on day one, and immediately start repairing the damage that Trump has done to this country, and the damage that Trump has done to the relationships with our foreign allies.
There were some who didn't think that Pelosi should be the next Speaker, and I was one of them. I believed it was time for some new and fresh blood to take the lead. And if these were normal times, that would have been true. But these aren't normal times. What we are witnessing now is unprecedented. And Pelosi turned out to be the perfect person to confront Trump. I don't believe any other Speaker could have checked Trump like Nancy has done. If Joe does get the nomination, I'm pretty sure he will pick a female VP as his running mate. And I like all of the female candidates so far, however my 3 favorites are Warren, Harris, and Klobuchar. Regardless of who he gets the nomination, I look forward to them taking down the traitor in the Oval Office, and the SDNY will be waiting for him with open arms when they do.
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@KarmaSwiss
Then please explain this.
In 1994, a Democrat led Congress passed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act — commonly called the assault weapons ban.
It prohibited the manufacture or sale for civilian use of certain semi-automatic weapons. The act also banned magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more.
In 2004, the Republican led Congress refused to renew the 10 year assault weapons ban after it expired.
Before the 1994 ban:
From 1981 – the earliest year in our analysis – to the rollout of the assault weapons ban in 1994, the proportion of deaths in mass shootings in which an assault rifle was used was lower than it is today.
Yet in this earlier period, mass shooting deaths were steadily rising. Indeed, high-profile mass shootings involving assault rifles – such as the ki//ing of five children in Stockton, California, in 1989 and a 1993 San Francisco office attack that left eight victimsDead – provided the impetus behind a push for a prohibition on some types of gun.
During the 1994-2004 ban:
In the years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Even including 1999’s Columbine High School massacre – the deadliest MassShooting during the period of the ban – the 1994 to 2004 period saw lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and deaths resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.
From 2004 onward:
The data shows an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.
Breaking the data into absolute numbers, between 2004 and 2017 – the last year of our analysis – the average number of yearly deaths attributed to mass shootings was 25, compared with 5.3 during the 10-year tenure of the ban and 7.2 in the years leading up to the prohibition on assault weapons.
Saving hundreds of lives
We calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70% lower during the period in which the assault weapons ban was active. The proportion of overall gun homicides resulting from mass shootings was also down, with nine fewer mass-shooting-related fatalities per 10,000 shooting deaths.
Taking population trends into account, a model we created based on this data suggests that had the federal assault weapons ban been in place throughout the whole period of our study – that is, from 1981 through 2017 – it may have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the years in which there was no ban.
Michael J. Klein, New York University
The Conversation
Published: June 8, 2022
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Devina
Or, maybe he simply believes that Biden has a better chance at beating Trump. This election is not like any other election. Removing Trump from office is the number one objective. If we the people, fail to remove the existential threat to America from the Oval Office, it will mean the beginning of the end of our democracy, and the end of our 243 year old constitutional Republic. We will have traded those 243 years away for a career criminal, con-man, traitor, and tyrant. It would also mean watching Trump do the unthinkable, placing another one of his unqualified cultist on the Supreme Court. This will easily be the most important and consequential election in our lifetime, so we can't F this one up, because there won't be any "do-overs." This election isn't really about Bernie or Biden, it's about Trump.
VOTE 💙 NO MATTER WHO!!! And that includes the Senate, because nothing changes unless we the people take back the Oval Office and the Senate.
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Dave A.
Indeed.
Trump has been violating the Constitution since was sworn in at noon on January 20, 2017. His decision prior to his inauguration to keep ownership and control of his businesses —a move that went against both long-standing historical practice and the advice of career government ethics officials—put him at odds with the Constitution’s original anti-corruption provisions the moment he was sworn in.
Emoluments Clauses, prohibit the president from receiving any profit, gain, or advantage from any foreign or domestic government. Impeachment, as outlined by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 65, is a political remedy for a president’s egregious violations of these prohibitions.
The Framers of the Constitution were very aware of the dangers from foreign influence on any president. This is why they created rules to prevent foreign governments from purchasing undue influence on a sitting President. Essentially buying a sitting President, which is basically what Putin and Saudi Arabia have done withTrump.
The rule prohibits anyone holding any “Office of Profit or Trust under the United States” from receiving any “emolument” from foreign powers. An emolument, for purposes of the Constitution, according to two courts, is any “PROFIT, GAIN, or ADVANTAGE. This rule is what has become known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause, and is located at Article I, Section 9, Clause 8.
The Framers of the Constitution were also worried about undue influence from individual States in the union, and by officials PROFITEERING from federal offices. The Framers were concerned that a powerful state might sway the president’s decision making to its own benefit.
To prevent against these types of abuses, the Framers developed the Domestic Emoluments Clause, at Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, which is a blanket prohibition against the president receiving any sort of advantage from any state government, or PROFITING from the federal government.
Not only have U.S. and foreign governments spent money at properties owned by Trump, but Trump's own political campaign and affiliated political committees have also spent at least $16.8 million at his businesses since he launched his 2016 bid, according to an analysis of federal election spending records. Republican political campaigns and PACs have spent just under $1.8 million at Trump-owned businesses so far this year in the 2020 election cycle.
A recent example of Trump's emoluments clause violations came last year in August when a visit from Saudi officials to Trump's Trump International Hotel in NYC helped boost the hotel's quarterly revenue by 13% in 2018's first quarter. The bump came after two straight years of booking declines for the property.
Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels. A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging at his Washington hotel through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks..
FUN FACT: The emoluments clauses are our country’s original anti-corruption laws. They are written into the document that created our government and defined our system of laws.
At a Cabinet meeting, Trump blamed the backlash and outrage over his attempt to profit from holding the G7 Summit at his Doral resort on “you people with this phony emoluments clause."😲😲
A perfect example of the utter contempt that Trump has for our Constitution, and the rule of law.
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Jessica Andis
Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.
Marco Rubio's Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik's two holding companies. Other high dollar recipients of funding from Blavatnik were PACS representing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at $1.1 million, Lindsey Graham at $800,000, John Kasich at $250,000 and Arizona Senator John McCain at $200,000.
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Oh well, so much for the so called party of "law and order."
It was always a charade.
Trump and his supporters believe in law and order, right up until the moment when law and order comes for them.
In other words, it's law and order first YOU, but not for THEM.
Cruelty is the point.
"It reflects a clear principle: Only Trump and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process."
"It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump."
"Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, blackVoters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. Trump’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them."
--Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, December 2019
"All cruelty springs from weakness."
--Seneca
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2bRealist
Thanks for that textbook example of whataboutism.
Deflecting or changing the subject is called "what-aboutism" — a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. And it's use in Russia helps illustrate how it has been a useful tool for Trump and his sycophantic defenders here in America. It's an attractive tactic for Trump and Putin, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking at the same time. What-aboutism is essentially a schoolyard taunt, brought to a national and global level.
The idea behind what-aboutism is simple: Party A accuses Party B of doing something bad. Party B responds by changing the subject and pointing out one of Party A's faults — "Yeah? Well WHAT ABOUT that bad thing you did?"
It's not a complicated tactic — any grade-schooler can master it. But it came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and afterward, as Russia.
Whataboutism has been common in Putin's Russia. The Atlantic cited one such example in 2014, noting that when the Kremlin faced criticisms of its treatment of protesters, government officials responded, "What about the United Kingdom? Breaking the law during public gatherings there could lead to a fine of 5,800 pounds sterling there or even prison."
One big reason whataboutism is so attractive: it's a simple way to shrug off criticism or even responsibility for any wrongdoings..
Whataboutism flattens moral nuances into a black-and-white worldview. But in this worldview, it's very difficult to be the good guy; idealism is the ultimate naïveté, and anyone who dares to criticize another can be "unmasked" as a hypocrite. This creates a useful moral equivalency. If nobody is perfect, then it means that Trump should get a pass for any wrongdoings. This tactic has been used in Russia for years, and it was perfected within the Soviet Union. It has allowed Russian dictators like Putin to get away with endless crimes against his own people.
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