Erdogan threw Trump’s ‘don’t be a fool’ letter in the trash – reports
Category: Trumpland
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The American Priority conference took place at Trump’s Miami Doral resort.
Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrumpSo now they are after the legendary “crime buster” and greatest Mayor in the history of NYC, Rudy Giuliani. He may seem a little rough around the edges sometimes, but he is also a great guy and wonderful lawyer. Such a one sided Witch Hunt going on in USA. Deep State. Shameful!2:11 AM · Oct 13, 2019Twitter for iPhoneUS President Donald Trump has defended his lawyer Rudy Giuliani as a “legendary crime buster” and “wonderful lawyer” after a media report that prosecutors are investigating whether the former New York mayor broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine.
“So now they are after the legendary ‘crime buster’ and greatest Mayor in the history of NYC, Rudy Giuliani,” Trump said in a statement on Twitter.
via Trump defends Giuliani amid reports of federal investigation
![Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota [Leah Millis/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/10/11/8160c50c536b4ac88dff7f37781dad3a_18.jpg "Trump impeachment inquiry: 10 developments you may have missed")
Trump declares all American Institutions corrupt and therefore has the right of executive privilige. The right od a Dictator (ODT)
By contrast, the new report paints a picture of widespread opposition to the president’s actions within his own White House.
Four, and possibly more, national security officials in the White House were concerned about Trump’s actions, according to the report, both before and after the president’s now-infamous July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the call, Trump strongly indicated that U.S. assistance to Ukraine could be contingent on Zelensky giving him what he wanted, specifically: investigations into the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden.
What’s not so obvious is that this conspiracy extends to the rule of law. According to this skewed version of reality, corruption has penetrated the bedrock institutions of American society: the political sphere, the intelligence agencies, the mainstream media. Corruption has transformed the very fabric of politics, culture, and law.
To root out corruption, then, it’s necessary to step outside the rule of law. Donald Trump hasn’t declared a state of emergency. But he is acting as if he has (which, in case you’re wondering, is illegal). His decision not to cooperate with congressional inquiries, including the most recent impeachment inquiry, is also part of this unstated state of emergency.
It’s all OBSTRUCTION of a Co-Joint Congressional Committee (ODT)
via Here’s Another Impeachable Offense: Trump’s War on the Constitution – Mother Jones
The waning of American Democracy and power in less than 3 years. The moral bankruptcy of a Nation in full relief (ODT)
The Trump administration has blocked a planned deposition from Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union and a central figure in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, according to a statement by his lawyer.
Trump administration blocks testimony of central figure in impeachment inquiry
The second whistleblower poses a threat to the president’s attempts to downplay the scandal because the second person supposedly has first-hand knowledge of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
via A Second Whistleblower Is Coming Forward in Ukraine Scandal, Attorneys Say – Mother Jones
As the impeachment saga gathers pace, even some Republicans fear that we’re looking at the ’doomsday president’
via If Donald Trump goes down, he’ll try to take everyone with him | Opinion | The Guardian
Trump suggested following Israeli tactics at his wall and shoot their legs (ODT)
It’s legal because I’m President. I can rob a bank shoot you it’s legal (ODT)
via Trump Now Wants China To Investigate The Bidens | HuffPost Australia
Show your hand Giuliani or fold (ODT)
US President Donald Trump urged Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a phone call to assist an investigation designed to discredit the Mueller probe into Russian election interference.
Details of the phone call were restricted to only a select number of senior officials, mirroring the handling of Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The New York Times reported.
The revelation of the call, confirmed by other US media outlets, comes just over a week since Morrison appeared at a campaign-style rally alongside Trump in Ohio and dined with him at a state dinner at the White House.
Two administration officials said the call between Trump and Morrison had occurred in recent weeks, and was explicitly made to discuss the Russia issue. It is not clear whether Morrison agreed to Trump’s request.
via Trump asked Scott Morrison to help discredit Mueller probe into 2016 election
The businessman whose just a honarary President not a REAL one. Is that a FAKE PRESIDENT? (ODT)
Donald Trump’s resort on the west coast of Ireland was paid €100,000 (£89,000) by the Irish state to provide food to police officers protecting the US president during a two-night visit this year, it has emerged.
via Ireland paid Trump resort €100k to host police protecting him | US news | The Guardian
“You’ve heard President Trump talk. That’s President Trump,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Richard Nixon, who resigned in the midst of the Watergate impeachment inquiry because his party began to abandon him.
“The big difference between this and Watergate is “It was a bipartisan effort and you certainly don’t have that here.”
Trump’s hold on the Republican Party makes it nearly impossible to foresee a scenario in which the GOP-controlled Senate convicts Trump if he were impeached by the Democratic-run House.
The president is acutely well aware that it’s his party alone that can protect him. In the midst of the past week’s firestorm, he tweeted to Republicans: “Stick together, play their game and fight hard Republicans.”
He later deleted the tweet.
For Trump, A High-Velocity Threat Like None He’s Ever Faced | HuffPost
A president should not brazenly lie and make shit up.
At the Maguire hearing, the acting DNI was asked about the whistleblower—whose identity remained a secret. Is the whistleblower a “political hack,” Rep. Adam Schiff followed up: “You don’t have any reason to accuse them of disloyalty to our country?” Maguire provided an unequivocal response: “Absolutely not…I think the whistleblower did the right thing.”
In other words, there was no basis for Trump’s denunciations of the whistleblower.
Later, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) returned to this subject. She asked Maguire, “Do you believe the whistleblower was spying…on the president?” Maguire answered, “I believe the whistleblower complied with the law and did everything they thought, he or she thought was responsible under the Intelligence Community Whistleblowers Protection Act.”
Speier then asked Maguire if Trump had asked him to share the identity of the whistleblower. “I can tell you emphatically no,” he said. And had anyone else in the White House or Justice Department done so? “No,” he said.
So if Trump and the White House did not know the whistleblower’s identity, how could Trump question this person’s loyalty, blast him or her as a partisan plotter, and accuse the whistleblower of spying?
via Trump’s Intelligence Chief Offers a Timely Reminder: Trump Is a Liar – Mother Jones
Still, when Joe Biden went to Ukraine, he was not trying to protect his son — quite the reverse.
The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.Giuliani, Trump, and their lackeys began spreading the false accusation that Biden had traveled to Ukraine to blackmail the government and force officials to fire the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to derail an investigation into Burisma.
Shokin had been forced from office at Biden’s urging because he had failed to thoroughly investigate corruption and stifled efforts to expose embezzlement and misconduct by public officials. Biden did threaten to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees unless Shokin was ousted. But that was because Shokin had blocked serious anti-corruption investigations, not because he was investigating Burisma.
In 2001 the U.S. threatened the end of military and foreign aid if nations did not conclude bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. troops before the International Criminal Court.
More recently, the U.S. used its muscle against Ecuador, including dangling a $10 billion IMF loan, in exchange for the expulsion of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its London embassy.
This is how the U.S. conducts “diplomacy.”
The anonymous CIA whistleblower said that the Trump-Zelensky conversation, in which Trump repeatedly leaned on the Ukrainian president to have Joe Biden and his son Hunter investigated (implying that no military aid would be forthcoming otherwise) was only one of many such illegal conversations with foreign leaders.
White House staffers have been stashing the transcripts of these criminal interactions in a special electronic server used for highly classified documents.
The whistleblower also says that the reports of the Zelensky conversation were conveyed to him by several persons, who repeated the same details.
What this means is that there are numerous impeachable crimes and numerous potential whistleblowers who heard them occur or who have reliable reports of them.
via Witness Intimidation: Unbalanced Trump Seeks Whistleblower sources, hints Execution for Espionage
The whistleblower who revealed that President Donald Trump sought foreign help for his reelection and that the White House sought to cover it up is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.
The man has since returned to the CIA, the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public on Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.
In an essay for the blog Lawfare he noted that the process could further divide the nation, but he also observed that “if the point of an impeachment effort is less to remove a particular individual from office than to establish or reinforce the proper expectations of officeholding, then the ultimate fate of the impeached officer is of less importance than the message sent by the impeachment.
“Impeachments can be, and have been, a vehicle for constructing, consolidating and reinforcing an important set of constitutional norms. They are a means for asserting that some behaviour is beyond the pale.”
via Even if it fails, impeaching Donald Trump will serve a noble purpose
There are plenty of reasons the White House might not want the whistleblower complaint to come out. It could have more details that go beyond what’s in a transcript. It might have other instances of impropriety by the president.
The whistleblower complaint absolutely has to come out. It’s very clear that Congress not only has a right but has a responsibility to this material.
BUSTED
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that in the course of his conversation in July with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump pressed him on eight separate occasions to investigate Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.
Biden when vice president is known to have pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor whom the International Monetary Fund and the Obama administration felt to be ineffective in dealing with corruption.. The prosecutor had once upon a time investigated a company on the board of which Biden’s son Hunter served. But by the time Biden exerted his pressure, that investigation was dormant and there were never any Ukrainian findings of corruption on the part of Hunter Biden.
via Bribery & High Crimes and Misdemeanors: Did Trump finally go Full Impeachable in Ukraine Calls?
The day after Mueller’s testimony, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pressured Zelensky to help him win the 2020 election by investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. In the weeks that followed, Trump refused to grant Zelensky a meeting at the White House and halted $250 million of congressionally authorized military aid to the country, raising the possibility that the president was, as The Washington Post put it in an unsigned editorial, “not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign” but using U.S. military aid to “extort it.”
via Donald Trump Is Asking A Foreign Country To Help Him Win. Again. | HuffPost Australia
On Thursday night, the Post reported that the complaint “centers on Ukraine,” fueling speculation it is related to the Trump team’s public efforts to compel that nation’s government to reopen an investigation with the intention of damaging the 2020 presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden. In a combative CNN interview later that night, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed that he had “ask[ed] Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.”
It’s early in the life of this story and while the reporting thus far seems ominous, there are a host of unanswered questions.
Alaskan Arctic now warm enough to fuck (ODT)
via Trump opens protected Alaskan Arctic refuge to oil drillers | US news | The Guardian
Trumps dream of a Nobel Prize blew up in his face again but in his eagerness to show what a failure he infact is he twittered the promise of a peace accord and it’s failure ought to be sufficient to gain him the recognition he craves. Promise of peace in Iran, Afghanistan Syria and Nth Korea along with their accompanying failures Trump believes should be enough to have him crowned and celebrated as a global Caesar rather than a screwed up Nero. Afterall the blame is not his. (ODT
But little was made of that at the time. The endgame of the talks seemed near, if not the timetable. Only then came Trump’s tweets on Saturday night disclosing that he had invited the Taliban and Ghani to Camp David — but called it off, citing the bombing.
The tweets took many in the administration by surprise; there was no reason for Trump to reveal what had happened, several officials said, especially since he has not given up on the idea of a negotiated settlement.
via How Donald Trump’s secret plan to meet the Taliban came together, and fell apart
“Mr. Trump’s Blame List is long,” reported Peter Baker for The New York Times. “On top, of course, is Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve — never mind that Mr. Trump was the one who appointed him. Then there are the Democrats, and not to mention the news media. And on Friday, the president added American businesses to the list, arguing that struggling companies have only themselves to blame and are rationalizing their own mistakes by pointing to, just to name an example, Mr. Trump’s multibillion-dollar tariffs and America’s biggest trade war in generations.”
via Shifting Blame Is a Favorite Habit of Polluters and This President | The Smirking Chimp
American’s for Peace = a piece of you!! (ODT)
Bernie Sanders after Saudi Prison Massacre in Yemen: “We are Complicit in this Nightmare”
he’s yourPresident America (ODT)
