Trump’s Russian Connections Page

  • The biggest and worst problem with Trump is the Russian Connection.  At different times Trump has said both; that he did meet Putin, he’s talked to Putin, and he had a relationship with Putin.  And at other times Trump said that he did not meet Putin, he never talked to Putin, and he does not know Putin.  (Trump can’t have it both ways, he needs to pick a lie and stick to it.)  But Trump is defending Putin; Putin is a corrupt thief (he makes a salary similar to our President, $400,000. per year, but some how, on that salary, he has become one of the richest men in the world, a multi billionaire.  Putin is looting and stealing from his own country to the point that it’s as though he’s sucking money out of the country with a hose).  And Putin is a brutal murderous fascist dictator, he’s had people imprisoned over trumped up charges and they sometimes suddenly die in jail, he’s had people shot in the street, he’s had people thrown out of windows, he has poisoned over 30 people; there is a man that has been poisoned by Putin twice and he fought for his life and survived to testify to the US Senate.  There are even Russian social movements against Putin, one of them named Open Russia that Putin has banned.  And the founder of Open Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is the former head of Yukos Oil, former because Putin took his oil company from him; Putin imprisoned on fake fraud charges for 10 years all because Khodorkovsky opposed Putin.  Khodorkovsky managed to stay alive long enough for Amnesty International to help get him pardoned in 2014 then he went into exile in Switzerland.  But Trump says he admires Putin.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, reports on the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit, and talks with prominent Putin critic, political activist, and chess master Garry Kasparov.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, reviews the history of post-Soviet Russia and the rise to power of Vladimir Putin.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, looks at the criminality and corruption of the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia and the brutality committed against those who try to expose it.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, looks at some of what one report counts as over forty mysterious political deaths in Russia in just the past three years.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, looks political and activist opposition to Vladimir Putin in Russia, growing despite the ever-present threat of crackdown and prison.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, and NBC’s Kelly Cobiella look at how members of the American political right are building an appreciation for Vladimir Putin through guns and Evangelical Christianity.

And you have to ask yourself why Trump is kissing Putin’s butt.  There is a dossier that claims the Russians have dirt on Trump.  So the answer could be something about Russian hookers, which does not surprise me since he’s cheated on his past wives, so why not his current wife too.  But even if the Russians do have that dirt on Trump this goes much further than blackmailing Trump over just cheating.  And even though Trump lied about it, as usual, and said that he had nothing to do with Russia Trump has business investments in Russia.  Trump’s son even admits that they have business in Russia but Trump is also trying to make more money in Russia.

 

 

 

 

 

The President’s eldest son (Donald Trump Jr.) son-in-law (Jared Kushner) and former campaign chairman (Paul Manafort) are sitting down with the staff and members of several Senate committees, but sources tell CNN some of the meetings will be behind closed doors and not under oath.  But even if the men don’t raise their right hand before speaking, they still have to tell the truth.  Federal law makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” give “materially” false statements to Congress, even if unsworn — which is not to be confused with the more general crime of perjury for lying under oath.  The consequences for either crime are serious: one can face up to five years in prison.  Like many criminal statutes, however, proving a witness “knowingly” sought to mislead sets a high bar for prosecution — meaning the omission can’t be merely a mistake or accident.  And the “materiality” requirement means the false statement has to actually matter — i.e., a tendency to influence the listener.  While it is rare to see charges filed for lying to Congress, there is precedent.

 

 

 

On The Rachel Maddow Show Walter Dellinger, former U.S. solicitor general, talks with Rachel Maddow about a lawsuit filed against Donald Trump for his role in the public sharing of materials hacked by Russians during the 2016 election.

Invasion of Privacy lawsuit complaint against Trump and Roger Stone over stolen e-mails due to Russian hacking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the Fertilizer King’s private plane was seen parked at the same airports near Trumps plane in several cities that Trump went to campaign in but Trump claims he never met the guy.  Obviously the Fertilizer King was following Trump around the country to several cities for a reason.

 

European countries, including Germany, Estonia, Poland and Australia, as well as the Dutch, the French and the British even have information about Trump’s people contacting the Russians.  Other countries like The United Arab Emirates, whose Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, even arranged secret meetings between one of Trump’s people, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian close to Putin in an effort to create a back channel line of communication between Putin and Trump.  The meeting took place around January 11th, 9 days before Trump’s inauguration, in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean.  Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or Trump’s transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

 

  • There is even a dossier about Trump and his people illegally colluding with the Russians (Trump and his people were in on it with the Russians). The more the investigators check the information in the dossier the more they are finding it true and the former MI6 British spy, Christopher Steele, who wrote the dossier went into hiding when it 1st came out in January because he was worried about his own safety, he returned in March, and the US Senate and Congress want him to testify (some are even willing to go to him if necessary).

On The Rachel Maddow Show Julian Borger, world affairs editor for The Guardian, talks with Rachel Maddow about why a staffer to Representative Devin Nunes sent people to London to find Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, and why he didn’t tell investigators what he was doing.

 

 

 

 

 

The wide-ranging interview covered many topics, but among them was what some might see as a threat towards Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 General Election.  Amid many suspicions that the real story behind Trump and Russia is financial support and possible money laundering, Trump apparently “warned that investigators would cross a red line if they delve into Trump family finances unrelated to Russia,” according to the report.  Trump said too that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was running “an office rife with conflicts of interest.  The president said as far as he is aware, he does not believe he is personally under investigation by Mueller.  “I’m not under investigation.  For what?  I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump told the newspaper.

In addition Trump says if he had known ahead of time that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, he would have chosen someone else for the post, calling the move “very unfair.”  On Sessions, Trump said, “if he was going to recuse himself he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.”  And Trump also accused James Comey, the FBI director that he fired in May, of trying to save his job by leveraging a dossier of compromising material on Trump.

The interview, which the New York Times described as “wide-ranging,” also included questions about health care and other topics, but the Russia investigation and its fallout dominated the conversation, the newspaper says.

The discussion about “adoptions,” is apparently a reference to the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law meant to punish Russian human rights abusers by barring them from entering the US.  The Russian parliament responded to the law by banning American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.  It is the same law that Donald Trump Jr. says was a topic of conversation at a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on then-campaign opponent Hillary Clinton.  According to the New York Times: “Mr. Trump acknowledged that it was ‘interesting’ that adoptions came up since his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year’s campaign.”

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump told the New York Times he never would have hired Jeff Sessions as attorney general if he knew he was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on a New York Times interview of Donald Trump in which Trump expresses his dissatisfaction with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Justice Department officials, raising the question of whether any of them will resign.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Department of Justice, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s distorted view that the Justice Department, including the FBI, should be in his loyal service.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, talks with Rachel Maddow about the appropriateness of A.G. Jeff Sessions’ recusal from campaign-related investigations, and Donald Trump’s inappropriateness in addressing his myriad conflicts.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell In an astonishing interview with the New York Times, Trump said if knew Sessions would recuse himself in the Russia probe, he’d have picked a different Attorney General.  Lawrence O’Donnell explains this is a “signal” from Trump about the unfolding investigation.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks says Trump’s extraordinary public attack on AG Jeff Sessions reminds her of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre – and warns Sessions against taking Nixon’s legal advice.  Mieke Eoyang and John Heilemann also join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Trump says he wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sessions if he knew he was going to recuse himself and blasts James Comey & Bob Mueller.

 

Trump’s legal team declined to comment on the issue.  But one adviser said the president has simply expressed a curiosity in understanding the reach of his pardoning authority, as well as the limits of Mueller’s investigation.  With the Russia investigation continuing to widen, Trump’s lawyers are working to corral the probe and question the propriety of the special counsel’s work.  They are actively compiling a list of Mueller’s alleged potential conflicts of interest, which they say could serve as a way to stymie his work, according to several of Trump’s legal advisers.  A conflict of interest is one of the possible grounds that can be cited by an attorney general to remove a special counsel from office under Justice Department regulations that set rules for the job.  The president is also irritated by the notion that Mueller’s probe could reach into his and his family’s finances, advisers said.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Walter Dellinger, former assistant attorney general and acting solicitor general, talks with Rachel Maddow about some of the excuses the Donald Trump team is trying out in search of a pretext for firing Robert Mueller as special counsel in the Trump Russia probe.

 

Can a president pardon himself?  Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”  We agree.  The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.  The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal.  It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution.  That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.

The pardon provision of the Constitution is there to enable the president to act essentially in the role of a judge of another person’s criminal case, and to intervene on behalf of the defendant when the president determines that would be equitable.  For example, the president might believe the courts made the wrong decision about someone’s guilt or about sentencing; President Barack Obama felt this way about excessive sentences for low-level drug offenses.  Or the president might be impressed by the defendant’s subsequent conduct and, using powers far exceeding those of a parole board, might issue a pardon or commutation of sentence.

Other equitable considerations could also weigh in favor of leniency.  A president might choose to grant a pardon before prosecution of a person when the president believes that the prosecution is not in the national interest; President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in part for this reason.  Or a president may conclude that even if a person may have committed a crime, he was acting in good faith to protect the national interest; President George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Casper Weinberger in the Iran-contra affair in part for this reason.  In all such instances, however, the president is acting as a kind of super-judge and making a decision about someone else’s conduct, the justice of someone else’s sentence or whether it is in the national interest to prosecute someone else.  He is not making a decision about himself.

On All In with Chris Hayes Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended three articles of impeachment against then-President Richard Nixon, weighs in.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Bob Bauer, former White House counsel under President Obama, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether Donald Trump would have to announce if he has pardoned someone and whether a pardon could be seen as an obstruction of justice.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at reports that Donald Trump is considering pardoning Joe Arpaio, and considers whether Trump might use random pardons as cover for also pardoning family and colleagues who might be swept up in the Trump Russia investigation.

 

The effort to investigate the investigators is another sign of a looming showdown between Mr. Trump and Mr. Mueller, who has assembled a team of high-powered prosecutors and agents to examine whether any of Mr. Trump’s advisers aided Russia’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.  Some of the investigators have vast experience prosecuting financial malfeasance, and the prospect that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry could evolve into an expansive examination of Mr. Trump’s financial history has stoked fears among the president’s aides.  Both Mr. Trump and his aides have said publicly they are watching closely to ensure Mr. Mueller’s investigation remains narrowly focused on last year’s election.

During an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday (July 19th), Mr. Trump said he was aware that members of Mr. Mueller’s team had potential conflicts of interest and would make the information available “at some point.”  Mr. Trump also said Mr. Mueller would be going outside his mandate if he begins investigating matters unrelated to Russia, like the president’s personal finances.  Mr. Trump repeatedly declined to say what he might do if Mr. Mueller appeared to exceed that mandate.  But his comments to The Times represented a clear message to Mr. Mueller.

For weeks, Republicans have publicly identified what they see as potential conflicts among Mr. Mueller’s team of more than a dozen investigators.  In particular, they have cited thousands of dollars of political donations to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, made by Andrew Weissmann, a former senior Justice Department official who has expertise in fraud and other financial crimes.  News reports have revealed similar donations by other members of Mr. Mueller’s team, which Mr. Trump’s allies have cited as evidence of political bias.  Another lawyer Mr. Mueller has hired, Jeannie Rhee, represented the Clinton Foundation.  To seek a recusal, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can argue their case to Mr. Mueller or his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.  The Justice Department has explicit rules about what constitutes a conflict of interest.  Prosecutors may not participate in investigations if they have “a personal or political relationship” with the subject of the case.  Making campaign donations is not included on the list of things that would create a “political relationship.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers are split on how far to go in challenging the independence of Mr. Mueller, a retired FBI director and one of the most respected figures in law enforcement.  Some advisers have warned that dismissing Mr. Mueller would create a legal and political mess.  Nevertheless, Mr. Trump has kept up the attacks on him.  In his interview with The Times, which caught members of his legal team by surprise, he focused on the fact that Mr. Mueller had interviewed to replace Mr. Comey as the FBI director just a day before Mr. Mueller was appointed special prosecutor, saying that the interview could create a conflict.

In addition to investigating possible collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s advisers, the special counsel is examining whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.  Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters have portrayed Mr. Mueller and Mr. Comey as close friends.  While they worked closely together in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush and are known to respect each other, associates of both men say the two are not particularly close.

Mr. Mueller’s team has begun examining financial records, and has requested documents from the Internal Revenue Service related to Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, according to a senior American official.  The records are from a criminal tax investigation that had been opened long before Mr. Trump’s campaign began.  Mr. Manafort was never charged in that case.  Federal investigators have also contacted Deutsche Bank about Mr. Trump’s accounts, and the bank is expecting to provide information to Mr. Mueller.

 

Lawmakers are concerned that after the president’s recent blasts at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump could replace one of his longest-term supporters with someone willing to dismiss Mueller.  Sessions has recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump’s campaign.  Firing Mueller would violate that recusal.  Despite Trump labeling the investigation as a “witch hunt,” Mueller remains highly respected in Congress.  While still under-construction, the Senate plan to block Trump from firing Mueller has bipartisan support.

Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is working with the Democrats to craft a bill creating a three judge panel to review the firing of any special counsel investigating a president or that president’s team.  “This isn’t just about this special counsel,” Graham said.  “It’s about anyone who meets this specific set of circumstances.  The panel of judges would review any firing of a special counsel to ensure it meets the statutory requirements.  The panel would determine whether the firing was legitimate or not.”  Graham’s plan has support among Democrats, though his frequent ally, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., wondered “How we can stop the president from firing the people he appointed I don’t know.”

In the House, Representative Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said he has instructed his staff to write a bill that, if Trump fires Mueller, would have Mueller rehired, and keep his investigation alive.  “The plan would be for Congress to rehire him, to put him beyond the reach of the president,” he said.  “I think if the president was to make any effort to fire Mueller, it would ignite a storm.”  But Representative Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said that while he believed the Senate could find bipartisan support, he has serious doubts whether the House, where Republicans have a strong majority, would agree.  “I don’t think we’d have many members of the other party in this house willing to say that firing Mueller was a step too far,” he said.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Graham bill would stop Trump from firing Special Counsel Mueller.  Jeff Sessions is speaking out about being under public attack by Trump over the Russia investigation and Lindsey Graham has issued a warning to the president about the consequences of firing the attorney general.  Paul Butler and Ron Klain join Lawrence O’Donnell.

 

John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday (July 20th) that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining.  “Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he wrote in an email.

The president told the New York Times on Wednesday (July 19th) that any digging into matters beyond Russia would be out of bounds.  Trump’s businesses have involved Russians for years, however, making the boundaries fuzzy.  The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller instructs him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” suggesting a relatively broad mandate.

Agents are interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary.  In addition, they are examining the efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real-estate properties.  The information about the investigation was provided by someone familiar with the developing inquiry but not authorized to speak publicly.  The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie partly in a wide-ranging money-laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara last year, according to the person.

FBI agents already had been gathering information about Manafort, according to two people with knowledge of that probe.  Prosecutors hadn’t yet begun presenting evidence to a grand jury.  Trump fired Bharara in March.  The Manafort inquiry initially focused on actions involving a real-estate company he launched with money from Ukraine in 2008.  By the time Bharara was fired, his office’s investigation of possible money laundering extended well beyond that, according to the person briefed on the Mueller probe.  The Bharara investigation was consolidated into Mueller’s inquiry, showing that the special counsel is taking an overarching approach.  The various financial examinations constitute one thread of Mueller’s inquiry, which encompasses computer hacking and the dissemination of stolen campaign and voter information as well as the actions of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.  Joshua Stueve, Mueller’s spokesman, declined to comment, as did a Manafort spokesman and Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner.  Spokesmen for the White House, Trump Organization and Ross didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC.  In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes.  Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo.  The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there.  About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine.  At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC.  Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy.  In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.  As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

On All In with Chris Hayes The president doesn’t want Robert Mueller to cross a ‘red line’ and look at his finances.  Good luck with that.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at some of the background of former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort that is being looked at in the Trump Russia investigation and notes that if Trump is afraid the investigation is getting to close, he’ll have to fire Jeff Sessions before he can fire Robert Mueller.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Ashley Parker, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about new reporting that Donald Trump is trying to undercut Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and is asking advisers about pardoning himself, aides and family members.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael Beschloss, NBC News presidential historian, talks with Rachel Maddow about the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump’s queries about pardon power and his “blood-chilling” intentions toward the FBI that would undo decades of ethical standards and independence.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Greg Farrell, investigative reporter for Bloomberg News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Special Counsel Robert Mueller including Donald Trump’s personal business and finances as part of the Trump Russia investigation.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The Washington Post reports Donald Trump is asking about his ability to pardon aides, family members, and himself, and that his lawyers are looking for ways to limit Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.  Post reporter Rosalind Helderman joins Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Amid breaking news from the Washington Post and New York Times, the 11th Hour panel weighs in on the Trump White House plan to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Bob Bauer, former White House counsel under President Obama, talks with Rachel Maddow about what happens to the Trump Russia investigation if Donald Trump tries to go after Robert Mueller or the investigation itself.

 

The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign emails read to The Washington Post.

The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.  Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made.  Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Admiral Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.

But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted.  Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials.  Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal from Papadopoulos for Trump to do so.

The exchanges are among more than 20,000 pages of documents the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees this month after review by White House and defense lawyers.  The selection of Papadopoulos’s emails were read to The Post by a person with access to them.  Two other people with access to the emails confirmed the general tone of the exchanges and some specific passages within them.

Papadopoulos emerges from the sample of emails as a new and puzzling figure in the examination of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials and their proxies during the 2016 election, now the subject of a special-counsel investigation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports breaking news from Bloomberg News that among thousands of documents turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating Trump-Russia, roughly 20,000 of them are from the Trump campaign.

 

  • Trump does not even understand the issue, he thought that the Democrats would be happy about Comey being fired.  No, we are smart enough to not believe Trump’s fake reasons for firing Comey and to recognize a coverup when we see one.  And if you notice whenever someone investigates just a little too much and either finds information or gets close to finding information out about the Trump Russia connections then Trump fires them, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara, James Comey, who is next?

 

 

These coverups or attempted coverups are crimes, they are obstruction of justiceObstruction of justice is a crime, in and of itself, with or without the crimes of collusion and conspiracy.  And some have even mentioned election fraud too.  The subpoenas have started to fly and people have started to lawyer up.  Here are some of Rachel Maddow’s thoughts about Comey being fired and other Russia issues.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on the latest embarrassing spectacle from the Donald Trump administration and points out the facets of a solidifying Republican counter narrative that aims to discredit the FBI and the Trump Russia investigation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Tim Weiner, historian of the FBI and CIA, talks with Rachel Maddow about the Republican effort to discredit the FBI and the Trump Russia investigation, and what Donald Trump doesn’t understand about the FBI.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams As Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues his investigation into all things Trump and Russia, former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman says he believes Trump’s behavior makes him look guilty.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Analyzing Trump’s behavior concerning the Russia probe, former Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks says she believes the President’s actions make him look guilty.

 

 

  • This is the height of corruption; you can’t get much more corrupt than all this with Trump and his people. 17 different intelligence agencies agree that we were hacked by the Russians along with propaganda, disinformation and fake news all disseminated by the Russians which is still going on.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the timeline of a Trump-promoted, hacked e-mail-driven conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton collusion with Ukraine as it made its way through the White House, a Russian web site, and Fox News on its way to Trump supporters.

Hell Trump even looked right into TV cameras and asked the Russians to hack Hillary and said that they would be rewarded.  The intelligence agencies like the CIA, the spies, had evidence of the Russian’s election interference fairly early on.  So the intelligence agencies do not even trust Trump enough to tell him some things that other Presidents knew like how they get information from the Russians because they are afraid that he will leak it back to the Russians.

 

And Nigel Farage (the Brexit guy, the British Exit from the European Union) may be in bed with WikiLeaks, Trump and the Russians too.  Nigel Farage was seen going into and coming out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where the owner of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is hiding out (Julian Assange, the owner of WikiLeaks, is hiding and has been hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 to evade arrest and prosecution by Sweden for rape, he is a criminal).  But Nigel Farage claimed that he couldn’t remember what he was doing in that building when he was asked as he was coming out of the building.  And now Nigel Farage is a “person of interest” in the US counter-intelligence investigation that is looking into possible collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.  Sources with knowledge of the investigation said the former Ukip leader had raised the interest of FBI investigators because of his relationships with individuals connected to both the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whom Farage visited in March.

On All In with Chris Hayes The Russophilic Republican Congressman confirmed to journalists that he met with the Wikileaks founder, whose organization has been deemed by the U.S. as a ‘hostile intelligence actor,’ and now he wants to brief Donald Trump on the meeting.

 

  • Jeh Charles Johnson

 

  • That is very similar to Watergate, with Watergate the DNC (Democratic National Committee) was broken into and bugged (wiretapped), Nixon and his crew just did not have the technology to hack at the time and since no one else had the technology at the time either there was nothing to hack into at the time.  And one could throw Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal into the mix too.  But this is ending up being worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra put together, for one thing with Nixon at least American people did the breaking in and the bugging but with Trump he had the Russians doing the hacking.  Plus this is moving much faster than Nixon’s crap was and this has much more going on with it.  And Nixon was always talking about leaks to the point that he created a unit he called “The Plumbers” to find and stop all the leaks.  Trump is also always talking about “illegal leaks” he just hasn’t created his version of “The Plumbers” yet.  Perhaps because Trump is actually massively more ignorant than Nixon ever was.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael Beschloss, NBC News presidential historian, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the differences between Donald Trump’s current situation and Richard Nixon’s situation ahead of his resignation.

 

 

 

The letter written by Attorneys that Trump paid to say whatever Trump wanted to say proves nothing what so ever, there is no proof to backup anything in the letter at all.  “This is an artfully written letter, covering a limited time period,” said David Cay Johnston, an expert on taxes and a former New York Times Reporter who has written extensively about Trump.  “Much of what we need to know about Trump and Russian money and that includes money from Kazakhstan, Turkey and other places where Russian oligarchs operate involves transactions prior to 10 years ago.”

 

  • After Trump won the election the Russians were celebrating, they were having Trump documentaries on TV, and they were having Trump parties, there was even a Trump band that played rock & roll.  During the campaign debates Hillary called Trump “Putin’s Puppet” and she was right.  Everything that Trump was trying to blame on Hillary during the general campaigns actually applied to Trump himself and/or Trump’s people; even to the point that Vice President Pence is doing the exact same thing that Trump badgered Hillary about for months, using a private computer server and it got hacked but Pence is trying to claim it’s not the same.

 

 

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Attorney Steven Harper has prepared a timeline with more than 400 data points of all the events surrounding the Trump team and Russia.  He prepared it as if it had to be presented to a jury.  Lawrence O’Donnell also discusses the findings with Bill Moyers.

A congressman, Congressman Eric Swalwell of CA, has a “Connect the Trump-Russia Dots“ guide on his website.  And Swalwell and other Congress people and Senate people want independent investigations.  There are multiple investigations, both espionage and criminal, for the initial crimes of Collusion and Conspiracy and the coverup crime of Obstruction of Justice, as well as financial crimes such as Money Laundering, and the situation worsens on a daily basis.  This is an elaborate, involved complicated scheme, one hell of a giant hot mess, and you have to follow the web of puzzle pieces or dots to put it all together.  And more puzzle pieces or dots show up every day, the level of corruption with Trump is unbelievable and much more than we have ever seen before.  I guess the thought was sabotage and any other dirty thing they could think of to do was easier than winning fair and square and with integrity, cheat to win by any means necessary.  Trump is an illegitimate President; Trump and the Russians basically stole the Presidency, the executive branch of our government; we only have 3 branches, Executive (which is the President), Legislative (which are the Congress and the Senate) and Judicial (which are the courts), to our government and they took a whole branch.  This is basically a bloodless (since no one has a bullet in their head, yet) political coup, that’s what this is a political coup, this is RussiaGate and this may not end well for Trump.  People in other countries know political coups quite well but we, the United States, were never supposed to have any political coups (bloodless or otherwise); our system was set up to avoid having this happen at all.  But yet here we are with RussiaGate in our faces.  The New York Times asks is Trump the Criminal President?  I, for one, say that Trump is the Criminal President.  And The New York Times also offers some free advice to Trump aides: “Quit while you can” but it may be already too late for that.

 

  • And, by the way, Russia wants Alaska back; they even went so far as to create a petition while Mr. Obama was still in office, written in clunky English, on the official White House website seeking Alaska’s secession and return to Russia. Some people took it as a joke but some people took it seriously.  They had generated more than 37,000 signatures; a little more than a third of the 100,000 signatures they needed at the time, 2014, in order for Mr. Obama to respond.  If they get more signatures then we’ll see if Trump actually gives Alaska back to the Russians.

And Russia was also trying to get California to secede from the United States.  The petition needed 585,407 valid signatures by July 2017 to qualify for next year’s, 2018, ballot.  But luckily the Moscow based leader of the “CalExit” campaign, Yes California Independence Campaign President, Louis Marinelli, decided to secede himself back to Russia so he resigned and withdraw his petition.

 

 

Trump’s Lies Page

 

Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration’s ties to the Russian government.  His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.  Fox’s president of news, Jay Wallace, told NPR on Monday (July 31st 2017) that there was no “concrete evidence” that Wheeler was misquoted by the reporter, Malia Zimmerman.  The news executive did not address a question about the story’s allegedly partisan origins.  Fox News declined to allow Zimmerman to comment for this story.

The story, which first aired in May, was retracted by Fox News a week later.  Fox News has, to date, taken no action in response to what it said was a failure to adhere to the network’s standards.

In the suit, Mr. Wheeler, who is a Fox News contributor, asserts that he was a pawn in a broader plan by the White House, a Trump supporter named Ed Butowsky and Fox News to “shift the blame from Russia and help put to bed speculation that Trump colluded with Russia in an attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election.”  The lawsuit, alleging defamation and racial discrimination, was filed Tuesday (August 1st 2017) morning in the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Rich, who worked for the Democratic National Committee, was fatally shot in July 2016.  The case is unsolved.  The retracted article, citing law enforcement sources, said Mr. Rich had shared thousands of D.N.C. emails with WikiLeaks — a theory that would undercut the assertions that Russia had interfered in the election on behalf of Mr. Trump.  Mr. Wheeler, who is black, states in the suit that he has faced discrimination at Fox News because of his race.  Mr. Wheeler, who is paid a set amount for each appearance he makes on the network, says that he has received less airtime, money and notoriety than his white colleagues.

On All In with Chris Hayes The President of the United States stands accused, in a federal lawsuit, of conspiring with Fox News to promote a fringe conspiracy theory about a murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich, in order to invalidate the Russia scandal.

On The Rachel Maddow Show David Folkenflik, media correspondent for NPR, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about a lawsuit accusing Fox News of colluding with the Donald Trump White House to invent a story about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich in order to distract from the Trump Russia scandal.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Paul Butler, former federal prosecutor, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about whether Donald Trump can legally be compelled to testify about his role in fabricating a fake news story in a lawsuit against Fox News.

 

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell In December, Chuck Jones, the head of the union representing Carrier workers, was attacked on Twitter for saying Trump was wrong to claim he helped save “a minimum of 1,100 jobs” at the plant. We now know who was telling the truth. Jones gets the last word.

 

 

  • In March Trump started accusing Obama of a felony federal crime which is wire tapping Trump Tower and Trump’s phones without a warrant before the election in a tweet. Trump was asked to provide proof by 3/13/17 but Trump has no proof or evidence of that what so ever, there is no basis in fact or even reality.  And that’s not even something Obama could have done even if he wanted to.  Even the agencies that would have actually done the wire tapping, if Obama had actually done any wire tapping, said that it’s not true.  And it’s not like Mr. Obama would have been running around through Trump Tower with wires and tape recorders himself.  Obama was a constitutional attorney if he ever had any wire tapping done of anybody at all there would have been a warrant.  Trump and his buddy Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department asked for more time so they had until 3/20 to comply but nothing was ever produced, it was totally a wild goose chase.  Then in April Trump started blaming Susan Rice, the former National Security Adviser under Mr. Obama, for wire tapping, yet another wild goose chase.  Trump even dragged one of his Republican cohorts, US Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who, as House Intelligence Committee Chairman, was supposed to be investigating the Trump Russian connection issue, into this wire tapping mess to try to create a fake scandal about the wire tapping claim.  Trump and Nunes were trying to make it look like Nunes found some documents proving Trump’s wire tapping claim.  But that didn’t work out that well for them especially for Devin Nunes, who, ended up stepping down as House Intelligence Committee Chairman.  Just more of Trump’s lies, made up crap, delusions, hallucinations, distractions or what ever you want to call them.

 

  • Trump’s people lie so much that one of them, Kellyanne Conway (a senior advisor), said something was an ”alternative fact” which is actually a lie.  So then everybody was talking about Trump and his “alternative facts”.  People are entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts, there are no “alternative facts”, either it is a fact or it is not a fact.  Trump was speaking at a rally on the February 18th and he was talking about a terrorist attack in Sweden that happened on the February 17th but the Prime Minister of Sweden said he didn’t know what Trump was talking about because there was no terrorist attack in Sweden and asked what Trump was smoking.  Kellyanne Conway said that there was a terrorist attack, a massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky, she made it up there was no massacre in Bowling Green.  Kellyanne Conway even said that microwave ovens can spy on you, no they can’t.

And don’t even get me started about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, on a daily basis he aggressively defends the indefensible, Trump.  And with no facts what so ever Spicer attacks the media in the process.  And the new White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, lies as much as the former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer.

The issue is not who is standing at the podium and lying, the issue is that they are lying at all.  You can not believe anything Trump says or that any of his people say, Trump does not have a credible bone in his body so people have to watch what he does not what he says because what he says are lies and a lot of it doesn’t even make any sense and he says one thing and then does a 180 degree turn to do something totally different.

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, denied a business client was behind his passionate call to fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray.  But of course, a vocal opponent of Cordray is in fact paying Lewandowski tens of thousands of dollars.

 

  • And, by the way, if you like the idea of the wall between the US and Mexico then I hope you like it enough to pay for it because that’s who’s paying for it, not Mexico, not before or after the wall is built, that is if the wall gets built at all.

 

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The New York Times Sunday published an extraordinary definitive list of the more than 100 lies Donald Trump has told as president.  Lawrence O’Donnell talks to Stuart Thompson, who worked on the piece.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Kurt Andersen and Lawrence O’Donnell discuss Donald Trump’s many lies in office and a new poll that shows only 36% now view the American president as “honest” – which comes as the Trump White House has decided to pick a fight with the press corps.

 

 

Trump’s Harm To Rights

Everyone has to worry about their constitutional and human rights not just people coming from other countries.  Getting rid of rights, protections and regulations may be great for businesses but if you’re a human being, even a human being with a business, not so much.  And can be viewed as an attack on all except the top 1% to 10% of the people in the country who can always afford to go around anything that anyone throws at them.  What about the rest of us, the bottom 90% to 99% of the country who are still here?  Although there is nothing new for the Republicans to want to do this but Trump and the current Republicans in office are going much further than they had in the past and they are looking through everything and finding ways to undo rights, protections and regulations, that we previously took for granted as Americans, and to do as much harm as possible.  Or as Bill Maher says in his New Rule: “What Would a Dick Do?”.

 

*The text of the “Big Day” TV ad follows:
“Every day we trust that our families and kids will be safe.
Safe in their beds…
And in the car on the way to school.
That our homes and workplaces will be safe.
And that when our kids play, the air they breathe and the water they drink will be clean.
We trust their grandparents will have a safe flight when they come to visit.
And that our food will be safe to eat.
Fair enforcement of common sense safeguards keeps our families safe.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are working with corporate lobbyists to undo these safeguards.
We can’t let Trump and Congressional Republicans put corporate profits ahead of our health and safety.
Because our loved ones should come first.”

Watch the “Big Day” TV ad here and it is downloadable too.

 

On June 30th 2017, Trump delivered on that vow, signing an executive order that would establish a commission to investigate alleged voter fraud and voter suppression in the American election system.  According to the text of the executive order, the commission will be tasked with studying “those laws, rules, policies, activities, strategies, and practices that enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes used in Federal elections” as well as those laws that “undermine” that confidence, in addition to “those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices … that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.”

In isolation, this sounds unobjectionable.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating a commission to address problems in our election system.  The trouble is who is leading that commission: Vice President Mike Pence and, more importantly, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Far from a neutral figure, Kobach is a fierce advocate for harsh, restrictive voting laws.  By itself, his presence is a sign that this commission is a sham, and that the drive for “confidence” is actually a push to raise the barriers to voting and participation.

To understand why Kobach’s presence on this panel is so alarming, you need to know his background.  The architect of draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama—as well as the mind behind Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” rhetoric—Kobach has been a prominent champion for voting restrictions.  In the aftermath of 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, Kobach emerged as a major voice for voter suppression.  He has backed strict ID laws and pushed for states to require a birth certificate or passport for registration, measures that primarily burden low-income voters, including many voters of color.  From his perch as Kansas’ top election official, Kobach has launched a crusade against “illegal voting,” winning power from state lawmakers to prosecute “voting crime.”  In keeping with most studies of voter fraud—which find little to no evidence of its existence—Kobach has found just nine cases of alleged fraud out of 1.8 million registered Kansas voters.

By making Kobach a co-chair for this commission, Trump has announced its actual purpose: to impose new strict requirements for voting and registration under the guise of “election integrity.”  And while the commission may include Democrats, Kobach’s presence robs it of any credibility.  It is a farce.

The chair of Trump’s Election Integrity Commission has penned a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.  In the letter, a copy of which was made public by the Connecticut secretary of state, the commission head Kris Kobach said that “any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public.”  On June 28th, the office of Vice President Pence released a statement saying “a letter will be sent today to the 50 states and District of Columbia on behalf of the Commission requesting publicly available data from state voter rolls and feedback on how to improve election integrity.”

Here’s what every state is saying.  Mississippi: Will not comply, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said the commission can “go jump in the gulf of Mexico.”, we’ll take that as a no.  Kansas: Will provide what’s publicly available, “Kobach now says Kansas won’t be sharing the last 4 social.  Update coming on http://KansasCity.com soon #ksleg”, so Kobach will not be fully complying with his own request.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on a new initiative from the Donald Trump administration, led by Kris Kobach, to gather lots of personal data from state voting records, a request that is not being well received by state officials.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s history and the people he is putting on his voter fraud commission point to a goal of suppressing voter participation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on the White House publishing the feedback to its voter fraud task force without redacting any of the personal information, hurting confidence in their ability to properly handle the actual voter data they seek.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Discussing the comments from both Trump and the vice chair of his election integrity commission, Charlie Sykes argues the president is undermining our entire election system.

 

“People supporting the EAC are quite frankly proponents for a greater federal role in our elections,” said Representative Tom Graves (R., Ga.) at a June committee hearing on the proposal to eliminate the agency.  “States themselves, they’re responsible for all the elections.  We do not have a federally run election system.”  However, Democrats have said Russian meddling in the 2016 election has boosted the importance of the EAC.  The agency helps train local officials on such tasks as recruiting poll workers and, during last year’s campaign, distributed memos keeping election officials apprised on potential vulnerabilities in voting systems.

The commission “has a unique task that they’re best situated to accomplish,” said Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who has been fighting to preserve the agency.  Mr. Quigly said that the intelligence community judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign of interference in the 2016 election makes it the “worst time” to try to eliminate the agency.  “Cutting funding to it is a green light to Putin to do it again,” said Mr. Quigley.  The Election Assistance Commission said in December it was “working with federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the potential breach and its effects.”  It said recently it has thoroughly scanned its systems to make sure there are no additional security concerns.  The commission provides election-management guidelines and develops specifications for certifying voting systems, though responsibility for administering elections ultimately falls to state and local governments.

The hacking probe is being conducted at the same time the FBI is undertaking a broader investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including attempts to get into state election databases, and whether anyone working with President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded in the effort.  Trump and his campaign have denied any collusion with Russian hacking.  It is unclear if the EAC hack is part of that review; the FBI declined to comment on the matter.

The hack appeared to include a breach of the EAC’s administrative-access credentials as well as access to nonpublic reports on flaws in voting machines, according to Andrei Barysevich, an analyst with cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.  Access to the reports could have allowed someone to exploit flaws in voting machines, Mr. Barysevich said.  The stolen credentials could have been used to install malicious code on the EAC site, thus potentially infecting any user of it.  The users could include state election officials, who might then use a thumb memory stick to interact with other machines, such as ballot machines not connected to the internet.  The security firm, which assessed the hack as having likely occurred in November, turned the information over to law enforcement in December, and Mr. Barysevich has been cooperating with the FBI on its probe.

 

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies.  But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minorities to university campuses.  Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Charlie Savage, reporter for The New York Times, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about his reporting on a memo that shows Donald Trump’s Justice Department under Jeff Sessions intends to sue universities for discriminating against white people through affirmative action.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Vanita Gupta, former acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the DoJ’s civil rights division under Jeff Sessions and his reported intention to attack affirmative action in college admissions.

 

In a two-paragraph statement, the White House said that Mr. Arpaio gave “years of admirable service to our nation” and called him a “worthy candidate for a presidential pardon.”  Mr. Trump called Mr. Arpaio “an American patriot” in a tweet later Friday.  “He kept Arizona safe!” the president said.

Mr. Arpaio had touted himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” making inmates wear pink underwear and serving jail food that at least some prisoners called inedible.  He was also at the forefront of the so-called birther movement that aimed to investigate President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

The criminal conviction grew out of a lawsuit filed a decade ago charging that the sheriff’s office regularly violated the rights of Latinos, stopping people based on racial profiling, detaining them based solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally and turning them over to the immigration authorities.  A federal district judge hearing the case ordered Mr. Arpaio in 2011 to stop detaining people based solely on suspicion of their immigration status, when there was no evidence that a state law had been broken.  But the sheriff insisted that his tactics were legal and that he would continue employing them.

He was convicted last month of criminal contempt of court for defying the order, a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail.

 

 

 

  • Trump had the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, roll back Net Neutrality rules. The Net Neutrality rules, approved by the FCC in 2015, were intended to keep the internet open and fair.  The rules prevent Internet Providers from playing favorites by deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic from specific websites and apps.  “If they get rid of the classification, they’re certainly toothless to enforce strong net neutrality rules and other consumer protections,” Gigi Sohn, a counselor to former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, told CNNTech.  The rules safeguarding a fair and open internet are gone so good luck getting to your favorite websites (that is if your favorite websites have not been censored).

 

As early as March, officials said, some of the 800,000 young adults brought to the United States illegally as children who qualify for the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, will become eligible for deportation.  The five-year-old policy allows them to remain without fear of immediate removal from the country and gives them the right to work legally.

Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who announced the change at the Justice Department, both used the aggrieved language of anti-immigrant activists, arguing that those in the country illegally are lawbreakers who hurt native-born Americans by usurping their jobs and pushing down wages.

Mr. Trump said in a statement that he was driven by a concern for “the millions of Americans victimized by this unfair system.” Mr. Sessions said the program had “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”

Protests broke out in front of the White House and the Justice Department and in cities across the country soon after Mr. Sessions’s announcement.  Democrats and some Republicans, business executives, college presidents and immigration activists condemned the move as a coldhearted and shortsighted effort that was unfair to the young immigrants and could harm the economy.

 

 

Their plans quickly changed on Friday, July 28th when Lizandro made a courtesy call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to inform officials he was moving and to seek permission to make his required yearly check-ins with ICE in a North Carolina office.  Lizandro “had his regularly scheduled check-in either August 17, or 18, but because he wanted to make sure he had everything in order for the fall, he notified ICE of this scholarship opportunity and the fact that he wanted to move to North Carolina in September,” said George Escobar, a senior director with CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group.  ICE told Lizandro it would consider his request and asked him to come in with his brother.  The two young men, who had fled El Salvador when Lizandro was 11 and Diego 14, were detained.

The Claros brothers had no criminal record.  “They did everything the right way,” Escobar told NBC News.  “Lizandro and Diego were detained despite the fact that they have never committed a crime, despite the fact that they came to the U.S. as children, despite the fact that they have been valuable contributors to their community and American society, and despite the fact that they would qualify for legal status under the new bipartisan DREAM Act,” said CASA’s Senior Legal Manager Nick Katz.

Their detention and possible deportation has drawn protest from the community.  On Monday (July 31st), high school graduates and members of the Bethesda Academy School soccer club stood outside the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington, D.C. protesting the pending deportation of their teammate.

The Trump administration regularly touts its arrests and deportations of people with criminal backgrounds and has said it’s fulfilling Trump’s pledge to get rid of the “bad hombres.”  But immigration officers also have been rounding up and deporting people with final deportation orders, regardless of circumstances of their age or that they have no criminal record beyond entering without legal permission.

The US is a nation of immigrants; the indigenous people of the 48 contiguous states (also known as The Lower 48) of the United States are various tribes of Native Americans also known as American Indians.  So unless you are a Native American Indian then you too are technically either an immigrant or descended from immigrants.  Whether you or your ancestors immigrated to this country of your own free will or not you are still technically either an immigrant or descended from immigrants because they were not or you are not a Native American Indian.  It is as simple as that, any other issues are beside the point.  And it is hypocritical to say well I was born here, okay, I was born here too but I am not a Native American Indian so I too am descended from immigrants.  Therefore, we need immigration reform so that people will be treated fairly and not dragged into countries that either they have not been in since they were small children or not been in since they were born and so families are not split up.

 

“This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy,” Mr. Trump said.  “This legislation,” he added, “will not only restore our competitive edge in the 21st century, but it will restore the sacred bonds of trust between America and its citizens.  This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first.”

The bill, sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, would reduce overall legal immigration by 41 percent in its first year and by 50 percent by its 10th year, according to projections cited by its authors.  The reductions would come almost entirely from those brought in through family ties.  The number of immigrants granted legal residency on the basis of job skills, about 140,000, would remain roughly the same, though a much higher proportion of the reduced overall number.

The proposal revives an idea that was included in broader immigration legislation supported by President George W. Bush in 2007 but that failed in Congress.  Republican supporters argued that it would modernize immigration policy that had not been updated significantly in half a century, but critics in both parties contended it would harm the economy by keeping out workers who filled low-wage jobs that Americans did not want.

Under the current system, most legal immigrants are admitted to the United States based on family ties.  American citizens can sponsor spouses, parents and minor children for visas that are not subject to any numerical caps, while siblings and adult children get preferences for a limited number of visas available to them.  Legal permanent residents holding green cards can also sponsor spouses and children.

In 2014, 64 percent of more than one million immigrants admitted with legal residency were immediate relatives of American citizens or sponsored by family members.  Just 15 percent entered on the basis of employment-based preferences, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an independent research organization.  But that does not mean that those who came in on family ties were necessarily low skilled or uneducated.  The projections cited by the sponsors said legal immigration would decrease to 637,960 after a year and to 539,958 after a decade.

The legislation would establish a system of skills points based on education, English speaking ability, high-paying job offers, age, record of achievement and entrepreneurial initiative.  But while it would still allow the spouses and minor children of Americans and legal residents to come in, it would eliminate preference for other relatives, like siblings and adult children.  The bill would create a renewable temporary visa for elderly parents who come for caretaking purposes.

The legislation would limit refugees offered permanent residency to 50,000 a year and eliminate a diversity visa lottery that the sponsors said does not promote diversity.  The senators said their bill is meant to emulate “merit-based” systems in Canada and Australia.

Trump appeared with Republican Senators Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.) at the White House to unveil a modified version of a bill the senators first introduced in April to cut immigration by half from the current level of more than 1 million foreigners each year who receive green cards granting them permanent legal residence in the United States.  Trump had met twice previously at the White House with Cotton and Perdue to discuss the details of their legislation, which is titled the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act.

On All In with Chris Hayes Things are bad for undocumented immigrants, and the White House is fanning the flames again.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Maria Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the Trump administration attacking immigrants in an effort to shore up his base while ignoring the value of immigrants to the American labor force.

The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss talk about the White House comments on the Statue of Liberty.  Beschloss compares it to separating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

 

After five months of bitter legal squabbling, the Trump administration’s modified travel ban took effect Thursday night under new guidelines designed to avert the chaos of the original rollout.  But the rules will still keep many families split and are likely to spawn a new round of court fights.  The State Department on June 29th announced new criteria to determine who will be allowed to enter the United States as a visitor or a refugee.  The travel restrictions are temporary for now — 90 days for visitors and 120 days for refugees coming from six Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.  But the administration took a particularly strict interpretation of a Supreme Court ruling June 26th that only those with “bona fide” relationships, such as close family members, can enter the country.  The administration’s new rules do not allow grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, cousins and fiances.  They do allow sons-in-law, daughters-in-law and stepchildren.  Advocates and lawyers criticized the family list as capricious.  “The president is supposed to protect American families, not rip them apart,” said Shayan Modarres, a lawyer with the National Iranian American Council.

The State of Hawaii is asking a federal judge to rule that the administration’s latest plan to carry out Trump’s travel ban executive order defies the ruling the Supreme Court issued on the subject just four days ago.  In a new court filing, lawyers for the state and for a Hawaii imam say guidance the Trump administration issued June 29th takes too narrow a view of what family relationships qualify to exempt a foreigner from the travel ban and would deny admission to refugees who should be exempt from the ban due to their connections to a US resettlement agency.  “This Court should clarify as soon as possible that the Supreme Court meant what it said, and that foreign nationals that credibly claim connections with this country cannot be denied entry under the President’s illegal Order,” Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin and private counsel Neal Katyal wrote in a motion filed June 29th with US District Court Judge Derrick Watson.  However, moments before officials were set to start limiting visa issuance under new guidelines, the State Department changed its website to indicate that fiancés of US citizens would be able to receive visas as usual.  When asked about the shift, a State Department official confirmed the change, but offered no explanation.

 

 

  • Trump made it harder for people to be able to buy a house.  Trump suspended, as one of his first acts as Commander-In-Chief, one of Mr. Obama’s last acts as President, which was to make FHA mortgages more affordable by cutting the insurance premium down from .85 percent to .60 percent for most borrowers.

 

Trump’s 1st tweet:  “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow……  8:55 AM – Jul 26, 2017”

For a full nine minutes, the nation, and the entire world for that matter, were on edge waiting for the rest of the message to come through via additional tweets.  We were all wondering what the ‘United States Government would not accept or allow,” but those at the Pentagon were even more frantic.  For nine whole minutes, Pentagon officials sat in anticipation, with officials telling BuzzFeed that they thought that the President was in the midst of announcing military action in North Korea or some other area of the world.  It was only after the second tweet came through that tensions subsided a bit.  Instead of an attack on North Korea, or another enemy State, Trump instead attacked the LGBT community here in the United States.

Then came Trump’s 2nd tweet:  “….Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.  Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming…..  9:04 AM – Jul 26, 2017”

And finally Trump’s 3rd tweet:  “….victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.  Thank you  9:08 AM – Jul 26, 2017”

There currently are military regulations that allow transgender troops to serve, and a tweet cannot undo those.  Pentagon officials told BuzzFeed News they read the tweet as a directive to craft the necessary policy and procedure to undo that regulation.  It does not appear the branches of the military have been ordered to craft new directives.  “The full implications of that tweet are to be determined.  My read of it is that it appears that those currently serving transgender troops will be forced out,” Brad Carson, the Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness from 2015–16, who help craft the policy that ended the ban a year ago.  “To have a tweet reverse a DoD personnel policy is unprecedented.”

On All In with Chris Hayes ‘To have a president who never served,’ said Senator Tammy Duckworth, ‘but instead got what, 4, 5 deferments to avoid service in Vietnam be a guy to question someone else’s patriotism because of their gender identity is sickening.’

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Trump’s tweets about a transgender military ban caught the Pentagon and Republicans off guard.  His snap decisions — like firing James Comey and calling the health care plan “mean” — tend to come back to bite him.  Ana Marie Cox and Max Boot join Lawrence O’Donnell.

 

 

 

 

 

  • Trump wants to get rid of regulations and consumer protections to make it easier for businesses to rip you off. I’m referring to, the full name of the bill is, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but it is better known and most often referred to as Dodd-Frank.  On February 3, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order asking the U.S. Treasury Department to revise Dodd-Frank regulations, basically to kill Dodd-Frank.  One financial reporter said “Trump’s Plan to Kill Dodd-Frank Act Could ‘Crash’ the Financial System” so it’s actually bigger than just being able to rip you off.

Its eight components made it less likely the 2008 financial crisis could recur.  It is the most comprehensive financial reform since the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall regulated banks after the 1929 stock market crash.  The republicans already crashed the economy once and safe guards were put into place to keep it from happening again and Trump got rid of those safe guards so it could happen again.  As reported in The Balance:

  1. Oversees Wall Street.
  2. Stops Banks from Gambling with Depositors’ Money.
  3. Regulates Risky Derivatives.
  4. Brings Hedge Funds Trades Into the Light.
  5. Oversees Credit Rating Agencies.
  6. Regulates Credit Cards, Loans and Mortgages.
  7. Increases Supervision of Insurance Companies.
  8. Reforms the Federal Reserve.

 

On June 14th 2017, a man angry with Trump unleashed a barrage of gunfire Wednesday morning at Republican members of Congress as they held a baseball practice at a park in Alexandria Virginia, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others in a frenzied scene that included a long gun battle with police.  The gunman, James T. Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old unemployed home inspector from southern Illinois, was killed in the shootout.  Two Capitol Police officers assigned to Scalise’s security detail were wounded.  Hodgkinson, who had been living in his van in Alexandria for the past few months, had posted anti-Trump rhetoric on his Facebook page and had written letters to his hometown newspaper blaming Republicans for what he considered an agenda favoring the wealthy.

Everyone’s thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.  This was not the right thing to do, violence is always the wrong way to go about things and is never the answer, violence will not solve the problem.  Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress came together in agreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all.  Coming-together is great, we should do that, however, this coming-together will not last, it never has and it has already started falling apart.  And thoughts and prayers are not enough, we need actions.  And I do not mean just the actions of the Democrats easily defeating Republicans 11 to 2 in the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game.  So looking ahead into the future, perhaps elected officials should look in the mirror and ask themselves what could I have done to have helped to prevent such actions.  Perhaps elected officials could start by toning down the vitriol and hateful rhetoric, for one thing.  We can disagree without being disagreeable.

Also perhaps elected officials should look in the mirror again and any elected officials who are in the pocket of the NRA and against sensible gun control, which are mostly Republicans, perhaps could reconsider that position and do the right thing because sensible gun control would have lessened the likely event of this happening again.  Especially if sensible gun control had been put in place after Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011.  The elected officials are busy trying to get more security even outside of Congress, they need that, but what about the rest of us?  The attack at the congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, is the 154th mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks information on shootings in the United States.  On 165 days through the calendar year, that averages out to a little less than one mass shooting per day.  The majority of the country is in favor of sensible gun control, even Republicans are in favor of sensible gun control, but not the elected Republicans.  The only reason we still do not have sensible gun control is because of elected officials who are in the pocket of the NRA so they are against sensible gun control, which are mostly Republicans.  Without sensible gun control tragedies like this and other mass shootings will happen again.

And perhaps elected officials should look in the mirror at least one more time to try to find some empathy for the other side.  Think about it, you may be rich now but how would you feel if you were already struggling and rich people just kept trying to take more from you even though the rich people did not need it because they are already rich?  Although I do not support or agree with what Hodgkinson did, the frustration of the Republicans taking from everyone else to give to themselves and to the rich, who do not need it, is real and understandable and 90% to 99% of us have it in one way or another.

 

But on the bright side of water news, on June 14th 2017 it was reported that the Michigan Attorney General is bringing charges against officials for the Flint water crisisThese are the 15 people criminally charged in the Flint water crisis.  Here on The Rachel Maddow Show Mayor Karen Weaver of Flint, Michigan, talks with Rachel Maddow about charges filed against Snyder administration officials in the Flint water crisis, including involuntary manslaughter related to deaths from a spike in Legionnaires disease.

 

  • Trump is killing the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency); he even removed climate change data and other scientific information from the website. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/29/epa-removes-climate-change-data-other-scientific-information-website/101072040/)  So I hope you used to like breathing clean air and drinking clean water, those may not be around too much longer.  So if at some point in the future you are able to light your faucet water on fire then blame Trump.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the dubious job Donald Trump’s EPA is doing as a steward of the environment and tells the story of Deborah Swackhamer, chair of the E.P.A.’s Board of Scientific Counselors, who was pressured by an EPA official to change her testimony to Congress.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Deborah Swackhamer, chair of the E.P.A.’s Board of Scientific Counselors, talks with Rachel Maddow about the pressure she received from an EPA official to change her congressional testimony and how the EPA’s outside scientific review board has been “decimated.”

 

  • June 1st 2017 Trump said that the United States will withdraw from the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change, the Paris Climate Accord agreement.  Trump also said he would start talks to re-enter the accord with what he called a more “fair” deal, but was immediately rebuked by several European governments.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said in a rare joint statement the agreement could not be renegotiated and urged their allies to hasten efforts to combat climate change.  They pledged to do more to help developing countries adapt.  “While the US decision is disheartening, we remain inspired by the growing momentum around the world to combat climate change and transition to clean growth economies,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  Even though China overtook the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2007 China’s state news agency Xinhua published a commentary on Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord, describing it as a “global setback.”  That’s how bad this is.  “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump said.  Pittsburgh’s mayor, Democrat Bill Peduto, shot back on Twitter that his city, long the heart of the US steel industry, actually embraced the Paris accord.  With Trump’s action, the United States will walk away from nearly every other nation in the world on one of the pressing global issues of the 21st century.  Syria and Nicaragua are the only other non-participants in the accord.  And Nicaragua did not participate because they did not think that the accord went far enough.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry denounced Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord.  Kerry warned, “kids will have worse asthma in the summer” because of Trump.  Kerry told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that Trump made “one of the most self-destructive moves I’ve ever seen by any president in my lifetime.”  Kerry said, “My immediate reaction is that it is an extraordinary abdication of American leadership, it is a shameful moment for the United States to have unilaterally walked away from an agreement which did not have one other country requiring us to do something.  It was a voluntary program.  We designed the program.  The president was not truthful with the American people today and the president who talked about putting America first has now put America last.  Together with Syria, which is in the midst of a civil war, and Nicaragua, which thought the agreement didn’t go far enough.  This is an extraordinary moment of fake news because the economy he described is not the economy of America.  America has been gaining jobs in solar.  Solar has gained 17 times the rate of our economy.  There are 2.6 million jobs in our country in clean energy.  Half of them are in states that Donald Trump won.  So he is not helping the forgotten American.  He’s hurting them.  Their kids will have worse asthma in the summer.  They will have a harder time having economic growth.  He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world.  And I think it is one of the most self-destructive moves I’ve ever seen by any president in my lifetime.”

The decision sets the world’s largest economy apart from almost all other nations on Earth, and moves in opposition to many large American companies, as well.  “Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the US’s leadership position in the world,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein wrote on Twitter.  CEOs of some of the largest US-based companies disagree with the president and his backers.  They say the Paris Agreement gives them a level playing field to compete with foreign rivals and would grow the economy and create jobs by encouraging investment in new technology.  A number of large American companies were among those advocating for staying in the Paris Agreement, including U.S. energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron and their European peers Royal Dutch Shell and BP.  The oil majors say the accord offers a framework for tackling global warming and gives the United States a role in steering the global response to climate change.  Even some coal producers like Cloud Peak Energy and Peabody Energy argued the United States should remain a party in order to negotiate coal’s future in the global energy mix.  CEOs of companies like Apple and Microsoft, among many others, also pushed Trump to uphold the agreement.  Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a Paris deal proponent whose company also benefits from a shift to renewable energy sources, immediately carried out his threat to leave three White House advisory councils after Trump spoke in the Rose Garden.  Here is additional world reaction to Trump pulling out of global accord.

After US Climate Accord exit some state and local governments step up.  Pittsburgh plans to step up its efforts to meet the climate goals Trump has repudiated.  And California made no secret of its ambitions when it enacted a landmark law on global warming just over a decade ago.  But here is the thing, countries can’t withdraw until three years after the Paris Agreement went into effect.  The Paris Agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016, so this means the US would have to stay with it until November 2019.  After that, the rules mandate a one-year notice period, which would mean a withdrawal in late 2020, after the next presidential election on November 3, 2020.  So vote.

On All In with Chris Hayes Former Vice President Al Gore sees reason for hope on climate change in his new movie, ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.’

On The Rachel Maddow Show Richard Engel looks at how countries like India are pushing for a greener future, and China is leading the way in wind and solar manufacturing and the jobs that come with it, while Donald Trump holds the U.S. back with a focus on coal.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Anne Thompson, NBC News chief environmental affairs correspondent, looks at how the city of Pittsburgh is pursuing green energy as part of its tech growth strategy as Donald Trump keeps the US facing backward at a coal-powered past.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Richard Engel talks with the former top U.S. diplomat in China, David Rank, who resigned from 27 years in foreign service over Donald Trump’s environmental policies, citing patriotism, parenthood, and Christianity as his motivation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Richard Engel traces the history of U.S. efforts to address climate change, from the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the Reagan administration to Donald Trump’s pullout from the Paris climate accord.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Janis Mackey Frayer, NBC News correspondent, looks at how the dropping price of solar energy is changing life in developing areas of the world.

 

But then Trump got mad and threatened to shut down the government in September 2017, tweeting “Our country needs a good “shutdown” in September to fix mess!”.  I do not know how or what Trump thinks shutting down the government will fix.  Shutting down the government will not only not fix anything but what it would do is damage the economy more than he is already threatening to do.  Trump’s team released its first full budget proposal on May 23rd 2017, which is the more complete version to the “skinny budget”, and CNN tells what this full version of Trump’s budget cuts and why.  This budget is no better than Trump’s previous budget.  Both Republican and Democratic Congressional Representatives say that Trump’s budget is DOA (Dead On Arrival)He’s going to crash the economy again.  Trump makes Bush look smart; at least it took Bush 8 years to crash the economy I don’t think it will take Trump even 4 years to do itLawrence O’Donnell talks to Senator Elizabeth Warren about Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Michael Flynn pleading the Fifth, and how the Trump-Russia investigation may make it easier for Trump to get his legislative agenda through Congress.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2:  Donald Trump donated his salary for the second quarter of 2017 to the Department of Education – after calling for over $9 billion in cuts to the department’s budget.

 

 

 

Trump’s Follow The Money Page

  • If you or someone you know thought Trump might be a good President because he’s a business man well part of the problem with that is Trump is not even a good business man. He inherited a lot of his money from his father and it’s easy to get more rich when you get people to do work for you then you don’t pay them.  And do you consider 6 bankruptcies a good business man?  And Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians.  Another part of the problem with thinking Trump might be a good President because he’s a business man is business and government do not work the same way, not even close.

 

  • The Trumps and their residential properties were well known in New York to New York residents for their long time history of housing discrimination. Since Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, was a racist he and his racist son, Donald J. Trump, who refused to rent apartments to African American tenants, were sued by the federal government’s Justice Department for racial housing discrimination.  Trump claimed the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients”.  But the complaints of discrimination went well beyond just New York City though, there were complaints of discrimination in Norfolk and there was also a lawsuit brought against Trump’s properties in Cincinnati, Ohio as well.  Trump even went so far as to counter sue the federal government for defamation and filed a contempt of court charge against the government as well.  The Trumps battled against the government for two years just so they would not have to sign a consent decree until they eventually gave up.  Trump claimed victory because there was no admission of guilt in the consent decree but there normally was no admission of guilt in a consent decree.  Then a few years later the government started to bring a second lawsuit against the Trumps for violating the consent decree but it expired before the Justice Department could bring the second lawsuit.

Whether one considers Trump a good business man or not there is no disputing that Trump’s residential properties have grown.  There are more than 400 condo units worth $250 million in the USA alone, anyone with enough money could buy one or multiple units or purposefully overpay for units, even foreign governments or officials, from the President of the United States.  The purchases could easily be made by either fake groups or people that used fake names.  In addition to enriching Trump’s pocket they also pay for access to the President of the United States and can ask for things.  This is a huge conflict of interest.  Since Election Day Trump sold at least 14 condo units and home building lots for about $23 million, half of them were sold to LLCs with no names listed in deeds.  That doesn’t even count Trump’s ownership of millions of square feet of office and retail rental space in multiple states.  There have been buyers and renters of Trump properties from at least a dozen different countries.  As an example of just one of the buyers, just before Trump was elected a fake foreign company spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condo units.  On the deeds from the fake foreign company’s purchases Eric Trump signed for the sellers, an accountant signed for the buyers, and the deeds do not identify any people behind the fake foreign company at all.  Not all of the LLC companies are set up for nefarious purposes, celebrities protecting their privacy, foreign dissidents hiding assets from an oppressive government, or law enforcement officers worried about their safety from criminals have bought properties under LLCs.  However, the bulk of Trump’s income is from real estate property sells and leases and business for Trump is up, probably better than ever since he has become President.  So several transactions were flagged in a lawsuit against Trump by an ethics watchdog group, alleging Trump violates the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, which forbids government officials from taking gifts from foreign powers.

Additional conflicts of interests exist with both new and existing Trump branded buildings in foreign countries, even though Trump himself does not own the Trump branded buildings, like the existing Trump Tower Istanbul in TurkeyTurkey’s elected President Erdoğan became a dictator so of course Trump congratulated him on that.  Or like the new Trump Tower Manila in the Philippines with similar issues.  The Trump branded tower, in Manila’s Makati district, wasn’t quite finished as of November 22, 2016, but it will top out at 57 stories. Brokers online are asking around $750,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in a city where the average worker takes home less than $10 a day.  Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appointed the real estate magnate, the chairman of Century Properties and one of the Philippines’ highest-profile businessmen, Jose E.B. Antonio, the man building Trump Tower Manila, as a special trade envoy to the United States.  So Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House even though Duterte is slaughtering his own people in his abusive “war on drugs” without even so much as any type of trial, which has resulted in the deaths of countless Filipinos, many of them poor.  Duterte aspires to kill as many people as Hitler did.  Possible crimes against humanity have prompted warnings from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the Netherlands.  Apparently crimes against humanity don’t matter to Trump as long as there is money to be made.

 

In 1984, a Russian émigré 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—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself.  Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union.  Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren.  Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself.  Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire.  From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months.  But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices.  The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos.  The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner.  According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.

If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—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.  “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the US government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration.  “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money.  It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”  When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.

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, to shelter and hide assets.”  A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York.  His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: 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.

Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the US election.  A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire.  Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.”  The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals.  And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine.  For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich.  To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin.  So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.

But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia.  A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia.  Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.  Many used his 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, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics.  “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant US attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.

It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches.  At the very least, with his 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.  But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the 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.

Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow.  But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come.  “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008.  “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991.  President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking.  Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.”  After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests.  According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams A stunning report in The New Republic alleges that, whether Donald Trump knew it or not, for decades he made a large portion of his personal fortune from Russian mobsters & oligarchs.

 

In 2005, the bank approved a $640 million construction loan so Trump could build his name-sake tower in Chicago. The tower, with dozens of multimillion-dollar condos, broke ground at the height of the real-estate boom.  As the project neared completion, the financial crisis hit, sending the global real-estate market crashing.  And when part of the loan came due, rather than pay it, Trump sued a lending consortium led by Deutsche Bank for $3 billion.  His suit argued that the financial crisis was equivalent to an earthquake, triggering a “force majeure” clause, which allows for a payback extension in extraordinary circumstances.  Deutsche Bank countersued, claiming Trump owed a $40 million payment, which was a personal guarantee on the debt.  The two later settled and, surprisingly, continued doing business together.  Today, Trump owes about $300 million to the bank, nearly half of his outstanding debt, according to a July analysis by Bloomberg.  That figure includes a $170-million loan Trump took out to finish his hotel in Washington.  He also has two mortgages against his Trump National Doral Miami resort and a loan against his tower in Chicago.  All four debts come due in 2023 and 2024.  Garten said the Chicago loan no longer has Trump’s personal guarantee because the project has been completed.

July 19th 2017 as reported in the New York Times:  During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump pointed to his relationship with Deutsche Bank to counter reports that big banks were skeptical of doing business with him.  After a string of bankruptcies in his casino and hotel businesses in the 1990s, Trump became somewhat of an outsider on Wall Street, leaving the giant German bank among the few major financial institutions willing to lend him money.  Now that two-decades-long relationship is coming under scrutiny.  Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly.  The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter.  And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.  It was not clear what information the bank might ultimately provide.  Generally, the bank is seen as central to understanding Trump’s finances since it is the only major financial institution that continues to conduct sizable business with him.  Deutsche Bank has also lent money to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and to his family real estate business.

Although Deutsche Bank recently landed in legal trouble for laundering money for Russian entities — paying more than $600 million in penalties to New York and British regulators — there is no indication of a Russian connection to Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, people briefed on the matter said.  The bank, which declined to comment, scrutinizes its accounts for problematic ties as part of so-called “know your customer” banking rules and other requirements.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In his stunning interview with The New York Times, Trump said if Special Counsel investigates too deep into his finances that would be a ‘red line.’ Charlie Sykes & Eugene Robinson react.

 

The stand-off over records from the Treasury Department’s financial intelligence section led Democratic Senator Ron Wyden to hold up the nomination of Trump’s pick for undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, New York attorney Sigal Mandelker, until investigators have access to the federal banking records, which detail suspicious financial transactions around the globe.  A vote on her nomination is on the calendar for this week, suggesting the two sides are close to a deal.  “We’re in talks right now,” Wyden told ABC News on Monday (June 19th 2017).  “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get what we need.”

Senate investigators have been in talks with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, since May over access to the banking records.  “I have stated repeatedly that we have to follow the money if we are going to get to the bottom of how Russia has attacked our democracy,” he said in May.  “That means thoroughly review any information that relates to financial connections between Russia and Trump and his associates, whether direct or laundered through hidden or illicit transactions.

The office which Ms. Mandelker has been nominated to head is responsible for much of this information.”  A spokesman for FinCen declined to comment, citing a policy “to never confirm or deny or comment on any investigations.”  FinCEN, the Treasury agency responsible for tracking the illegal movement of money, maintains a database of millions of transactions that have been flagged by banks as unusual or problematic, known as suspicious activity reports, or SARs.  Law enforcement agencies around the country have access to the information, but so far, congressional investigators have not had access.  “SARs have proven to be useful to criminal investigators in understanding financial relationships, identifying or confirming links between various parties, identifying patterns of illicit conduct and establishing new leads to be explored,” said Daniel Glaser, who served as undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence in the Obama administration.

In addition to tracking bank transactions, FinCEN monitors the suspicious movement of money through real estate and casinos, two sectors that were prominent aspects of Trump’s business empire for many years.  In February 2015, Trump Taj Mahal Associates agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty to FinCEN and admitted to having willfully violated reporting and recordkeeping requirements under the federal Bank Secrecy Act from 2010 to 2012.  Trump relinquished most of his interest in the casino in 2009, before it declared bankruptcy.  The casino was hit with a civil penalty of $477,000 in 1998 for similar reporting violations that dated as far back as 1991, according to records obtained by ABC News through the Freedom of Information Act.

Senate investigators have been looking for financial ties linking top Trump campaign aides to Russian and Eastern European businessmen, in part to determine whether any of their dealings involved criminals or those subject to US financial sanctions.  One of several areas of interest, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News, has been the pool of investors who helped finance construction of the Trump SoHo building in New York City.  Several names associated with the financing effort have alleged ties to money laundering or Russian organized crime.

ABC News previously reported on the role in the Trump SoHo project of Felix Sater, a twice-convicted felon who served prison time and had documented Russian mafia connections.  Trump Organization attorneys dismissed Sater’s role as minor and short-lived.  Sater resurfaced earlier this year, however, at a meeting with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and a Ukrainian official, purportedly to discuss a Ukrainian peace proposal.  Documents promoting the SoHo project identified one investor as Alexander Machkevich, a prominent Kazakh businessman who in 2011 was charged in Belgium with money laundering, a case that was eventually dropped.  The Financial Times reported that the case was closed after Machkevich and two other defendants paid a fine, while making no admission of guilt.

Among the suspicious transactions tracked by FinCEN are filings from banks required anytime they engage in a transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash.  Many millions of these reports are filed each year.  “As illicit financial activity is often conducted in cash, [the reports] are a valuable source of leads for criminal investigators,” Glaser said.  “SARs and CTRs [currency transaction reports] have proven highly useful to criminal investigators,” Glaser said.  “They are not, however, a magic bullet.”

 

  • The Justice Department inquiry led by Mueller now has added flavors.  The Post noted that the investigation also includes “suspicious financial activity” involving “Russian operatives.”  The New York Times was more specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by channeling them through offshore accounts.

If Russia is involved with Trump, either through potentially compromising US business relationships or through funds that flowed into his wallet years ago, in that context, a troubling history of Trump’s dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president’s own office in Trump Tower.  Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan.  During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the US to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees.  Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London.

Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there.  “It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump said in that deposition.  “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”

One of Bayrock’s principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups.  Before linking up with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the US government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass.  In a series of interviews and a lawsuit, a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering.  Kriss has sued Bayrock, alleging that in addition to laundering money, the Bayrock team also skimmed cash from the operation, dodged taxes and cheated him out of millions of dollars.  Sater and others at Bayrock would not comment for this column; in court documents they have contested Kriss’s charges and describe him, essentially, as a disgruntled employee trying to shake them down.  But Kriss’s assertion that Bayrock was a criminal operation during the years it partnered with Trump has been deemed plausible enough to earn him a court victory: In December, a federal judge in New York said Kriss’s lawsuit against Bayrock, which he first filed nine years ago, could proceed as a racketeering case.

Trump has said over the years that he barely knows Sater.  In fact, Sater, who former Bayrock employees say met frequently with Trump in the Trump Organization’s New York headquarters, once shepherded the president’s children around Moscow and carried a Trump Organization business card, apparently has remained firmly in the orbit of the president and his closest advisers.  Sater made the front page of the New York Times in February for his role in a failed effort, along with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lobby former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on a Ukrainian peace proposal.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the checkered past of a Donald Trump business associate who may become a legal liability to Trump, and reports on the new access by the Senate Trump Russia investigation to FinCEN documents that will help them follow Trump’s money.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Tim O’Brien, executive editor and columnist at Bloomberg View, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Donald Trump’s past business dealings could integrate with the Trump Russia investigation.

 

Kriss, a one-time Bayrock executive, also accused lawyers for defendant Felix Sater of trying to “gravely mislead” the court into looking at the underlying issues as a typical business dispute inappropriate for a RICO action.  Sater’s portrayal of the case “is patently false … unless a ‘garden variety’ business or employment dispute involves threats of bodily dismemberment … [and] a man convicted of defrauding investors of approximately $40 million acting as a shadow manager of a group of business entities that he used like piggy banks,” the filing states.  The case, initially filed in 2010, claims Bayrock — a New York-based real estate development company primarily owned by Sater and another named defendant, Tevfik Arif, starting in 2002 — collaborated with Trump on hotel projects while concealing the fact that Sater had been convicted of a felony related to the mafia and was allegedly skimming money.

Kriss and Ejekam, also a former Bayrock member, accuse Sater, Arif and others connected to Bayrock and related entities of fraudulently inducing them into working for Bayrock in exchange for ownership stakes and then engaging in a series of misdeeds and illegal payments.  The motion also accuses Sater of trying to use an old cooperation agreement with prosecutors to explain away an alleged nondisclosure of his previous legal troubles.  “Sater’s counsel appear to be under the unfortunate misimpression that the twice-convicted felon’s over-a-decade-old cooperation agreement gives him carte blanche to engage in all manner of illicit conduct for the remainder of his life,” the filing states.  The once-sealed initial complaint was publicized by the Associated Press in a December 2015 story detailing ties between Trump and Sater.

Former employees of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate developer with ties to Donald Trump, have hit back at a bid to sanction them over their long-running suit alleging that the company committed offenses under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.  Ex-finance director Jody Kriss and service provider Michael Chu’ di Ejekam, told a New York federal judge in a letter filed in the court docket Friday (February 3rd 2017) that they oppose Bayrock’s requests to sanction them for alleged misrepresentations and baseless factual contentions and to redact portions of a transcript of a deposition given by Kriss.  “The public has a right to access the materials upon which the Bayrock defendants seek the harshest of sanctions — dismissal of the action in its entirety — and to scandalize Mr. Kriss and the undersigned firm,” lawyers Bradley D. Simon and J. Evan Shapiro of Simon & Partners LLP wrote on behalf of Kriss and Ejekam in their letter to Magistrate Judge Debra C. Freeman dated Feb. 1.

Bayrock on Friday (February 3rd 2017) filed a motion for sanctions as well as a letter to Judge Freeman addressing the redaction of language from the deposition transcript that was sealed in an arbitration.  While “the Bayrock defendants believe the complete letter may be filed publicly,” the deposition testimony was given more than nine years ago in a now-resolved arbitration relating to a Bayrock development, Bayrock’s lawyer Walter A. Saurack wrote.

To expand his real estate developments over the years, Donald Trump, his company and partners repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics — several allegedly connected to organized crime, according to a USA TODAY review of court cases, government and legal documents and an interview with a former federal prosecutor.  The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.  Among them:

• A member of the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.

• An investor in the SoHo project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.

• Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.

• A former mayor from Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.

• A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.

Trump’s Russian connections are of heightened interest because of an FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian operatives to interfere in last fall’s election.  What’s more, Trump and his companies have had business dealings with Russians that go back decades, raising questions about whether his policies would be influenced by business considerations.  Trump told reporters in February: “I have no dealings with Russia.  I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away.  And I have no loans with Russia.  I have no loans with Russia at all.”  Yet in 2013, after Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow, he bragged to Real Estate Weekly about his access to Russia’s rich and powerful.  “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump said, referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors.

Five years earlier, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. told Russian media while in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” in places like Dubai and Trump SoHo and elsewhere in New York.  New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.  “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said.  “They all wanted to meet Donald.  They became very friendly.”  Many of those meetings happened in Trump’s office at Trump Tower or at sales events, Lenz said.

Dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many of those super-wealthy people are generally suspected of corrupt practices as a result of interconnected relationships among Russia’s business elite, government security services and criminal gangs, according to former US prosecutor Ken McCallion, as well as Steven Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations. “Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview. “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”

 

 

 

John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday (July 20th) that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining.  “Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he wrote in an email.

The president told the New York Times on Wednesday (July 19th) that any digging into matters beyond Russia would be out of bounds.  Trump’s businesses have involved Russians for years, however, making the boundaries fuzzy.  The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller instructs him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” suggesting a relatively broad mandate.

Agents are interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary.  In addition, they are examining the efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real-estate properties.  The information about the investigation was provided by someone familiar with the developing inquiry but not authorized to speak publicly.  The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie partly in a wide-ranging money-laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara last year, according to the person.

FBI agents already had been gathering information about Manafort, according to two people with knowledge of that probe.  Prosecutors hadn’t yet begun presenting evidence to a grand jury.  Trump fired Bharara in March.  The Manafort inquiry initially focused on actions involving a real-estate company he launched with money from Ukraine in 2008.  By the time Bharara was fired, his office’s investigation of possible money laundering extended well beyond that, according to the person briefed on the Mueller probe.  The Bharara investigation was consolidated into Mueller’s inquiry, showing that the special counsel is taking an overarching approach.  The various financial examinations constitute one thread of Mueller’s inquiry, which encompasses computer hacking and the dissemination of stolen campaign and voter information as well as the actions of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.  Joshua Stueve, Mueller’s spokesman, declined to comment, as did a Manafort spokesman and Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner.  Spokesmen for the White House, Trump Organization and Ross didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC.  In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes.  Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo.  The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there.  About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine.  At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC.  Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy.  In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.  As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at some of the background of former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort that is being looked at in the Trump Russia investigation and notes that if Trump is afraid the investigation is getting to close, he’ll have to fire Jeff Sessions before he can fire Robert Mueller.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Greg Farrell, investigative reporter for Bloomberg News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Special Counsel Robert Mueller including Donald Trump’s personal business and finances as part of the Trump Russia investigation.

 

Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia.  But this is hardly wayward.  It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin.  Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.

One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention.  But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.  As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump.  (Sekulow said that “the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope,” adding, “Georgia is not Russia.”)

The waterfront lot where the Trump Tower Batumi was supposed to be built remains empty.  A groundbreaking ceremony was held five years ago, but no foundation has been dug.  Trump removed his name from the project shortly before assuming the Presidency; the Trump Organization called this “normal housekeeping.”  When the tower was announced, in March, 2011, it was the centerpiece of a bold plan to transform Batumi from a seedy port into a glamorous city.  But the planned high-rise—forty-seven stories containing lavish residences, a casino, and expensive shops—was oddly ambitious for a town that had almost no luxury housing.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Adam Davidson, staff writer for The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about why a sketchy Donald Trump real estate deal in the nation of Georgia could expose Trump to legal problems, not to mention Russian “Kompromat.”

 

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the few times authorities have looked at Donald Trump’s financial bookkeeping and why that explains Trump’s apparently anxiety over the possibility that Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation will include Trump’s finances.

On The Rachel Maddow Show David Cay Johnston, investigative journalist and founder of DCReport.org, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s legal exposure through his financial records and why Trump’s legal representation isn’t what one would expect.

 

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: President Trump is on what he insists is a working vacation at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, but he found time to play some golf and interact with wedding guests – as a brochure for Bedminster weddings said he would.

On All In with Chris Hayes Despite expectations it would lose money in the first four months of the year, the hotel instead made a 2 million dollar profit.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Jonathan O’Connell, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about how the Trump International Hotel on Washington, D.C., functions as a social center of political influence for Republican politicians and still makes money for Donald Trump despite the obvious conflict.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Richard Painter, chief White House ethics attorney for the G.W. Bush administration, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the lawsuit against Donald Trump over his use of the presidency as a money-making gimmick.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams House Oversight Committee Democrats are asking federal agencies and Cabinet members whether your tax dollars are ending up in the hands of Trump’s businesses.  Our panel discusses.

Trump’s inauguration team raised a record breaking $107 million which doubled the previous record of Mr. Obama’s inauguration which was $53 million.  But Trump’s inauguration was much smaller than Mr. Obama’s inauguration was and Trump’s inauguration did not include any major high dollar entertainment acts like Mr. Obama’s inauguration did such as Beyoncé; there was not $107 million worth of inauguration.  Prompting some people to ask where is the rest of the money?  We know what the high dollar donors got in return for their money, access to Trump and the National Security Council to ask for things or as Trump put it when he accused Hillary of doing it during the campaign; “Pay for Play”, (oh, did I mention Trump is a huge hypocrite).  And on top of that some of the donations were made by either fake groups or people that used fake names, which is apparently fraud.  But what is Trump doing with that money?  Trump’s inauguration team claimed that the leftover money would be given to charity but in the months since the inauguration they still haven’t given it to any charity yet.  Just how long does it take to find a charity to give money to, not that long.  Where do you think that money is, I suspect it’s in their pockets.  And on top of that they kept raising money even after the inauguration, $7.1 million during the months since Trump’s inauguration, supposedly for Trump’s re-election campaign.

At least some of the campaign donation money has been found, On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares reporting on how Trump re-election campaign money is being used to pay for lawyers, including for Donald Trump Jr., and attempts to sort through some of the contradictory announcements made about changes in the Trump team’s legal representation.

June 28th 2017 with 40 months to go Trump hosts his first reelection fundraiser, the earliest of any sitting president.  The fundraiser, which people have paid anywhere from $35,000 to upwards of $110,000 to attend, was held at Trump’s second residence along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Trump International Hotel.  Being in a continuous campaign mode is profitable.  In 2000, Trump speculated that he could “be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and there is evidence to support the claim that he has profited off of both the campaign and the presidency.  When Trump initially set up his campaign headquarters at Trump Tower, he prided himself on being self-funded with a low-cost operation.  He later quadrupled the rent to $169,758 after he began receiving funds from donors even though he employed less staff than in the months prior.

The pattern of profiteering off his initial run is continuing into his reelection campaign.  According to FEC filings, the Trump campaign has sent $274,000 in rent to his offices in Trump Tower, even though his reelection campaign only employs 20 people.  That works out to about $91,000 a month, which is more than half of what he paid at the height of his campaign when 168 employees were on payroll.  So donors who are paying upwards of $110,000 to attend Wednesday (June 28th) night’s event for Trump’s reelection campaign, are also funneling funds back to Trump twice.  First, through the Trump hotel for the space, food and drinks.  Second, the money that’s left over will go to Trump’s campaign expenses, which includes rent at Trump Tower.  Because he still retains ownership, any event hosted at a Trump Organization Property by Trump the president, also benefits Trump the businessman.  Trump has also found ways to leverage the presidency to advance his business interests outside of his campaign.  Read more here.  On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman joins guest host Nicolle Wallace calling Trump and the RNC holding a fundraiser at Trump’s own D.C. hotel ‘worse than the Teapot Dome scandal.’

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was charging for stuff that does not usually get charged for, both of Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were going above and beyond by offering high dollar donors extra stuff like multi-day hunting or fishing trips with them and private receptions and meetings with their father and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, offered coffee with her as a prize to the highest bidder of an auction.  And one of Trump’s advisors, Kellyanne Conway, was saying to go buy Trump’s daughter, Ivanka’s, products.  That’s just a few examples, among the many, of how Trump is using this public office for his private gain, Trump does not have the best interest of this country in mind he has his own best interest and that of his family’s in mind and that’s not a good thing for any country.  And there is a reason why this kind of thing was not supposed to happen in the US.  On All In with Chris Hayes, Trump properties flourishing after Trump’s many visits, The President has spent a full quarter of his presidency visiting Trump properties – and it’s been a huge boon to the Trump Organization’s bottom line.

 

  • In 2012 Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as CEO running his own family’s real estate firm, The Kushner Companies, partnered with Israel’s Steinmetz family (which built a fortune as diamond traders) on real estate deals buying more than 40 buildings (or about $318 million worth) over several months in New York and New Jersey. Kushner’s most recent partnering with Steinmetz, in 2014, was on a $200 million Trump branded building in Jersey City.  Steinmetz is being investigated by law enforcement in 4 different countries but in the United States Steinmetz is being investigated for money laundering and bribing a government official in Guinea in West Africa over iron ore mining deals.  Kushner (who does not have to be corrupt himself but who knew about the corrupt business practices) doing business with a corrupt foreign company, Steinmetz, is a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is a crime.  The case went to court in New York April 24th.  Not that he has anything to do with Trump or Kushner what so ever but Frederic Bourke of the company Dooney & Bourke (they make luxury fashion accessories like purses and shoes) already went to jail for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so it is a real crime.

Even Kushner’s family and specifically Jared Kushner’s sister Nicole Kushner Meyer, is trying to get even richer from Trump’s position as President and Jared Kushner’s position as Trump’s Senior Adviser.  At events in Beijing and Shanghai China wealthy Chinese investors were encouraged to invest $500,000. in Kushner’s New Jersey luxury apartment complex and that would help them secure what’s known as an investor visa.  The tagline on a brochure for the events:  “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow previews three stories that are likely to shape the week’s White House news, including Reince Priebus talking with Robert Mueller, a Kushner associate in legal trouble, and a new look at sketchy Trump real estate deal.

 

NBC’s Chief Business Correspondent, Ali Velshi, who is a totally bald–headed man, said “he has a better chance of growing a full, thick afro” than the economy growing to 4%, 5% or 6%, enough to cover the tax cuts proposed by the Trump White House.  The Washington Post reported that many budget experts say they believe the White House’s plan would reduce federal revenue by so much that it would grow the debt by trillions of dollars in the next decade, growing interest costs and slowing the economy.  But Trump also wants to do massive military spending and then there’s the mass deportations he’s doing.  And the plus is Trump’s partial budget also known as a “skinny budget” cuts out most protections for most of the people who need them the most.  The Democrats managed to win the budget battle and to keep most protections for most of the people who need them the most at least until September 2017.  But then Trump got mad and threatened to shut down the government in September 2017, tweeting “Our country needs a good “shutdown” in September to fix mess!”.  I do not know how or what Trump thinks shutting down the government will fix.  Shutting down the government will not only not fix anything but what it would do is damage the economy more than he is already threatening to do.  Trump’s team released its first full budget proposal on May 23rd 2017, which is the more complete version to the “skinny budget”, and CNN tells what this full version of Trump’s budget cuts and why.  This budget is no better than Trump’s previous budget.  Both Republican and Democratic Congressional Representatives say that Trump’s budget is DOA (Dead On Arrival)He’s going to crash the economy again.  Trump makes Bush look smart; at least it took Bush 8 years to crash the economy I don’t think it will take Trump even 4 years to do itLawrence O’Donnell talks to Senator Elizabeth Warren about Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Michael Flynn pleading the Fifth, and how the Trump-Russia investigation may make it easier for Trump to get his legislative agenda through Congress.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell explains the difference between the tax reform Democrats want and the tax cuts Republicans want… and why President Trump’s confusion on taxes could hurt Republican efforts to cut taxes on the rich.

Does anyone, other than me, find it hypocritical that the Republicans always claim that we do not have any money for anything but yet they always want big tax cuts for the rich so we have even less money for anything?  And after 8 years of complaining about the deficit while Mr. Obama was in office that the Republicans let Bush create, because he started with the surplus that Clinton left, suddenly the deficit is no longer an issue again like when Bush was in office.  There is a pattern here, the Republicans get into office and run up the debt with big tax cuts for rich people and leave giant deficits.  Then the Democrats have to come in and recover and clean up the mess that the Republicans leave.  It was the most pronounced with the surplus that Clinton left, then Bush spent that surplus and ran up a giant deficit to the point that he crashed the economy, then Obama came in and recovered and cleaned up as much as he could, now here is yet another Republican who will leave yet another giant mess for the next President to have to recover and clean up from.  When is this circle going to end?  Have some common sense people, please.  Unless you make $1 million or more per year then you are voting against your own interests if you vote for Republicans.  Regardless of any other issues, there is no reason to vote for Republicans if you are not rich and 90% to 99% of us are not rich, especially when it comes to economic issues, they are not good at economic issues and their economic policies will never benefit you.  Republicans say anything to get elected but once in office they always do the same things.  Break the cycle.

 

 

 

Trump’s Fascism Page

  • The definition of fascism is:  fas·cism / ˈfaSHˌizəm/

 noun: fascism; noun: Fascism; plural noun: Fascisms

An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.

synonyms: authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, autocracy;

More

Nazism, rightism;

Nationalism, xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism;

Jingoism, isolationism;

Neofascism, neo-Nazism

“A film depicting the rise of fascism in the 1930s”

(In general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.

 

  • The definition of dictatorship is:  dic·ta·tor·ship / dikˈtādərˌSHip,ˈdiktādərˌSHip/

noun: dictatorship; government by a dictator.  “forty years of dictatorship”

synonyms: absolute rule, undemocratic rule, despotism, tyranny, autocracy, autarchy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, fascism;

More

oppression, repression

“growing up in the shadow of dictatorship”

a country governed by a dictator.

 Antonyms (a word opposite in meaning to another (e.g., bad and good).):  democracy

 

 

 

 

The head of one of the world’s biggest drug companies quit a presidential business panel as a result, saying he was taking a stand against intolerance and extremism.  Critics slammed Trump for waiting too long to address the bloodshed, as well as for initially saying that “many sides” were involved, instead of singling out the white supremacists widely seen as sparking the melee.  Several senators from his own Republican party had harsh words for him.

Some 48 hours into the biggest domestic challenge of his young presidency, Trump tried to correct course.  “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” the president said in a statement to reporters at the White House on Monday (August 14th 2017).  “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he said.

A 20-year-old man said to have harbored Nazi sympathies was facing charges he plowed his car into protesters opposing the white nationalists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people.  The accused, James Fields, was denied bail at a court hearing on Monday (August 14th 2017).

Trump said anyone who engaged in criminal behavior at the rally would face justice, the Republican president said.  “I wish that he would have said those same words on Saturday,” responded Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia on MSNBC.  “I’m disappointed it took him a couple of days.”  As the chorus of outrage over Virginia grew louder on Sunday, Trump stayed silent on the matter while at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

On All In with Chris Hayes ‘Nazis are bad’ should be the easiest gimme in American politics, says Asawin Suebsaeng, politics reporter for the Daily Beast.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the deadly racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in the context of other instances of white supremacist violence in the modern era, as well as what makes the weekend’s tragic events unique.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Mayor Michael Signer of Charlottesville, Virginia, talks with Rachel Maddow about how his city is dealing with the tragic consequences of white supremacist violence, and how he hopes his community can move forward.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares a look at some of the anti-hate, anti-nazi protests and rallies that took place around American in reaction to the tragic white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Carol Anderson, chair of African-American studies at Emory University, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the affliction of white supremacy in American culture is like a drug addiction that ultimately hurts everyone.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell argues that no matter what President Donald Trump said, he will always be the white supremacists’ favorite candidate.  This time the movement claimed the life of Heather Heyer.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The events in Charlottesville, VA, this weekend left the nation wondering: How could this happen in 2017?  Isabel Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the racist undercurrent that’s been with the U.S. since its birth.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell In an exclusive interview, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore joins Lawrence O’Donnell to react to this weekend’s violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer.  He doubles down on his commitment to resisting Trump.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump’s response to the violence Charlottesville received widespread condemnation except for leaders of the alt-right and white supremacist groups.  Our panel reacts to the latest.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Critics say Trump’s response to Charlottesville was too little, too late.  Presidential historian & author Jon Meacham and Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page react.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams After his initial response blaming violence and hatred in Charlottesville ‘on many sides,’ Trump’s stronger condemnation still has some in his party saying it’s too little, too late.

 

The president tried to brush past questions about the alt-right, a term embraced by a segment of Trump’s base, and quickly tried to turn attention to the other side.  “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?  Do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump asked.  “What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs?  Do they have any problem?  I think they do.”

It was a fierce reversal that unwound much of the damage control Trump’s aides had pushed in recent days.  Trump’s initial remarks — the president on Saturday condemned displays of bigotry, hatred and violence that occurred “on many sides” — were widely criticized for seeming to equate violence from white supremacists with counter-protesters.

It wasn’t until Monday (August 14th 2017) that Trump issued a new statement, declaring racism “evil” and forcefully condemning hate groups by name.  But on Tuesday (August 15th 2017) he rejected that revision and doubled down on his initial approach.  Trump cast himself as a cautious, fact-focused president, insisting that despite his history of celebrating vicious attacks or jumping the gun by offering speculation before law enforcement confirmed the facts, he was simply reserving judgment until the full story unfolded.  “Before I make a statement, I need the facts.  So I don’t wanna rush into a statement,” Trump explained.  “So making the statement when I made it was excellent.”

Trump described the “alt-left” as a “very, very violent” group that charged at protesters without a permit to even assemble in Charlottesville.  He reiterated that he condemned hate groups but argued that not everyone was a white supremacist or neo-Nazi.  And there were “very fine people on both sides,” he added.  “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said.  “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee.  I notice that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down.  I wonder: Is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?  You know, you really do have to ask yourself, ‘Where does it stop?'”

Trump said he wouldn’t change a thing about his approach.  “There was no way of making a correct statement that early.  I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters,” he said.  “I didn’t know David Duke was there.  I wanted to see the facts.”

Okay, so Trump flipped then he flopped then he flipped back again.  Basically Trump showed his racism.  Then someone wrote a speech for Trump to read with the correct words and everybody said well it’s 2 days late but at least he finally said it, but Trump could only stick with the good speech for 1 day and no more.  Then Trump went right back to not only showing his racism but doubling down on that.  And if you were surprised by any of this then you have not been paying attention.

On All In with Chris Hayes According to Reverend Traci Blackmon, who protested the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, the president was lying when he defended the behavior of the alt right marchers and blamed “both sides” for the violence.

On All In with Chris Hayes Since the violent protests in Charlottesville, lawmakers across the south are ramping up efforts to get rid of Confederate monuments in their cities.  Reverend Dr. William Barber and Representative Stacey Abrams weigh in.

On All In with Chris Hayes In the wake of Donald Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, Joy Reid asks historian Jon Meacham:  has he done permanent damage to the office of the presidency?

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the history of Ku Klux Klan in American politics and its quest for power and points out that it was no accident that Donald Trump helped give racists legitimacy with his remarks about the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael Beschloss, NBC News presidential historian, talks with Rachel Maddow about how far afield Donald Trump is from the American president’s function as a role model of responsible, moral leadership.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Congresswoman Karen Bass, part of the leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Donald Trump’s coddling of racist extremists emboldens white supremacist actions in the future.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Steve Schmidt, veteran Republican adviser and strategist, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Donald Trump’s comments about the racist rally in Virginia disgrace a generation of Americans who fought Nazis and force Republicans to speak out against their own leader.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump went off script with the media, blaming “both sides” for Charlottesville – shocking his staff and drawing bipartisan criticism (except from white supremacists, who praised his remarks).  Eugene Robinson and Yamiche Alcindor join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Trump’s media availability drew intense criticism from the right.  Former GOP Representative David Jolly says today may be the start of a primary movement to replace Trump.  He joins Lawrence O’Donnell and Jarvis DeBerry to discuss Trump’s long pattern of bigoted behavior.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump is defending efforts to preserve confederate statues like the one of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.  Lawrence O’Donnell looks back at the legacy of the man who was indicted for treason and led the Confederate Army.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Shocking his staff & the nation, Trump again blamed ‘both sides’ for Charlottesville violence eliciting praise from white supremacists.  Michael Steele, Ashley Parker, & Robert Costa join.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams During his inflammatory remarks on Charlottesville, Trump said not all those at the demonstrations were white supremacists.  Jon Meacham & Steve Schmidt react to Trump’s comments.

On All In with Chris Hayes After Trump’s defense of white nationalists, two officials who left the administration weigh the moral stakes for those who remain.

On All In with Chris Hayes The Republican Party is responsible for Donald Trump, says Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, but doesn’t know how to possess or disown him.

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump said some of them are ‘very fine people.’  So who exactly are the participants in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville?

On All In with Chris Hayes Frederick Douglass, who according to Donald Trump is being ‘recognized more and more,’ wrote an essay re-published by The Atlantic today on how to deal with ‘A Treacherous President who Stood in the Way.’

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares a new report from The New York Times that Donald Trump’s lawyer forwarded an e-mail arguing no difference between Robert E. Lee and George Washington.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow notes that contrary to expectations and the indications of a lot of sternly worded condemnations, no members of the Trump team actually resigned in the wake of his comments on the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Congress can do more than the bare minimum of tweeting condemnation of racism to address the actual problem with legislation.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about how best to anticipation and counter the political ambitions of racist groups emboldened by succor from Donald Trump.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Mayor William Bell of Birmingham, Alabama talks with Rachel Maddow about his decision to cover up the city’s Confederate Memorial and the legal pushback from the state for doing so.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump has divided the country in his mind Lawrence O’Donnell argues, between those who voted for him, and those who didn’t.  Now, he’s continuing to divide the country and even the people who once supported Trump are starting to call it quits.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Two of the president’s business councils were in tatters following his latest remarks on Charlottesville.  The business community has had enough with Trump, but have his supporters?  Christina Greer, Rashad Robinson, and David Cay Johnston join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Republican Governor John Kasich called Trump’s response to Charlottesville “pathetic” but congressional Republicans are struggling to criticize the president.  Former Republican and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will joins Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump’s business councils are no more after CEOs jumped ship and his staff is reportedly on edge after his latest Charlottesville comments.  Our panel reacts.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams The New York Times is reporting that Donald Trump’s lawyer John Dowd forwarded to journalists, government officials & friends an email with language likening Robert E. Lee to George Washington.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In a new editorial taking on Trump for his latest Charlottesville comments, the USA Today Editorial Board said Republicans should join Democrats in Congress to censure Trump.

On All In with Chris Hayes CEOs and lawmakers have broken with Trump over his Charlottesville response, but this isn’t the first time he’s stoked racial divisions.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: In the 1980s, Trump destroyed two historic sculptures wanted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to make way for Trump Tower.  Decades later, the New York Times discovered a Civil War monument on his Virginia golf course commemorates an event that never happened.

On All In with Chris Hayes ‘What did you think you were getting’ with Donald Trump, asks Charlie Sykes of Trump supporters in the wake of the president’s comments about Charlottesville.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow rounds up some of the military-related stories in the news, including the U.S. service chiefs speaking out in condemnation of racism and hate, and notes that in the U.S. military it is illegal to be a nazi scumbag.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow notes the new reporting on White House staffers claiming to be shocked by Donald Trump’s response to the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and points out that anyone who paid attention during the campaign should not be surprised now.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Mayor Greg Stanton of Phoenix, Arizona, talks with Rachel Maddow about his request that Donald Trump cancel a planned campaign-style rally out of concerns about violence and further divisiveness in the wake of Trump’s irresponsible reaction to the racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Veteran journalist and former LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers compares the Trump presidency to the Johnson administration.  He tells Lawrence O’Donnell why Trump’s reaction to the removal of Confederate statues demonstrates the president’s consistent inconsistency.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams As Trump lashes out against two key senators in his party, two other GOP senators question his stability, competence, & moral authority.  Eli Stokols, Katy Tur, & Jason Johnson react.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Using both Nazi & white supremacist imagery, The New Yorker, The Economist, and TIME are using their latest covers to call out Trump on Charlottesville.  Rick Stengel & Gillian Tett react.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams NBC News Presidential Historian and author Michael Beschloss discusses Trump’s controversial and inflammatory reaction to the violence in Charlottesville.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Mitt Romney said Donald Trump’s words caused “racists to rejoice” as another one of Donald Trump’s advisory boards saw mass resignations over his Charlottesville rhetoric.  Jon Fasman of The Economist and former Bush senior aide Peter Wehner join Ali Velshi.

On All In with Chris Hayes The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities quit en masse on Friday – but Trump insisted he was the one doing the dumping.

On All In with Chris Hayes Presidential arts committee members resigned en masse because “we don’t want to be complicit,” said former committee member Kal Penn.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: Icahn claims he is leaving with Trump’s blessing , but the timing is notable as organizations and business leaders cut ties with the Trump administration in droves this week following the president’s defense of white supremacists.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on a new marker on Mississippi’s Freedom Trail honoring the Tougaloo Nine, black students who staged a “read in” at a whites-only library and endured arrest and imprisonment for their trouble, but inspired countless others to work toward integration.

 

  • His senior advisor, Steve Bannon (who’s also known as Trump’s brain, the manipulator-in-chief and President Bannon) basically Trumps right hand man, is a racist, a xenophobic and an anti Semite who wants to destroy the government or as Steve Bannon phrases it “the deconstruction of the administrative state” and that is just what they are doing. And let’s not forget that he’s a misogynistic sexist also.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2:  Donald Trump is facing growing calls to oust Steve Bannon – and things aren’t looking good for the White House chief strategist.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump is facing growing calls to fire former Breitbart boss Steve Bannon, especially after the violence in Charlottesville.  Former Republican member of Congress David Jolly reacts.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams As calls continue to grow for Steve Bannon to be fired, the president seemed to distance himself from his controversial aide during his inflammatory comments on Charlottesville.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In a new interview with Axios, Trump aide Steve Bannon called Trump’s Charlottesville remarks a ‘defining moment’ of the Trump presidency.  Eugene Robinson & Jonathan Swan discuss.

 

Mr. Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shake-ups, came as Mr. Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for the deadly violence at a Virginia rally last week.  Critics of Mr. Bannon accused the president of channeling his chief strategist when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the left-wing protesters who opposed them.

“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.  “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”

A caustic presence in a chaotic West Wing, Mr. Bannon frequently clashed with the president’s other aides as they fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of government.  In an interview this week, Mr. Bannon mocked his colleagues, including Gary D. Cohn, one of the president’s chief economic advisers, saying they were “wetting themselves” out of a fear of radically changing trade policy.

Mr. Trump had recently grown weary of Mr. Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes.  The situation had become untenable, according to advisers close to Mr. Trump who were urging the president to remove Mr. Bannon — and, in turn, people close to Mr. Bannon were urging him to step down — long before Friday.

Mr. Bannon’s removal is a victory for Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel.  Yet Mr. Bannon may still prove to be a confidant for the president, offering advice and counsel from the outside, much like other former advisers who still frequently consult with Mr. Trump.  Mr. Bannon, in particular, had formed a philosophical alliance with Mr. Trump and they shared an unlikely chemistry.

Some White House officials also said Friday they expect some of Bannon’s allies inside the administration to exit with him.  Two such people are national security aide Sebastian Gorka and assistant Julia Hahn, although both have portrayed themselves in recent talks with colleagues as Trump allies first and Bannon allies second.

Despite his ideological similarities with Bannon, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is seen as safe.  He joined the campaign long before Bannon and has his own relationships with the president and other senior advisers.  He has also distanced himself from Bannon in recent weeks.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, a fiery, hard-right news site that has gone to war with the Republican establishment — for months was locked in a long and tortuous battle with senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and a coterie of like-minded senior aides, many with Wall Street ties.

Bannon had been expecting to be cut loose from the White House, people close to him said.  One of them explained that Bannon was resigned to that fate and is determined to continue to advocate for Trump’s agenda on the outside.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii reacts to Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House and Donald Trump’s behavior this week following his defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reviews some of Donald Trump’s weird staff picks, many of whom, it turns out, are united by a connection to Russia, but Steve Bannon, though also a weird choice, has a different explanation for how he got there.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Jane Mayer, staff writer for The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about the role of Robert Mercer in funding Donald Trump and Breitbart, and what he might do next with Steve Bannon out of the white House.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Just hours after it was announced he was out of the administration, Steve Bannon gave an interview where he said the Trump presidency is “over,” and he’s already back at Breitbart.  Ali Velshi discusses with Steve Schmidt, Jonathan Capeheart, and Wil Hylton.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Reports are conflicting over whether Steve Bannon was fired or resigned, but now that he’s gone and back at Breitbart, Bannon says he’s ready to ‘crush the opposition.  ‘ Our panel discusses.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In just 30 weeks in office, Trump’s White House has seen a slew of high-profile staffers cut loose.  Is this proof the chaos candidate will remain the chaos president?  Our panel discusses.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Saying that firing Bannon is just the president is ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Trump Titanic,’ Hawaii Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono says Trump is the big problem at the White House.

 

  • And his pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a long time racist that Coretta Scott King wrote a letter against being a judge 30 years ago was sworn in.  And let’s not forget that he’s a misogynistic sexist also.  And Sessions’ pick for Solicitor general, the attorney that actually goes to court for the government, is a long time segregationist.  Other than being a segregationist I know little about him but he’s probably a misogynistic sexist like the rest.  Trump once said that Black people have no education, no jobs, no housing, and that every time they leave out their doors (which I don’t know where they are leaving from because if they have no housing then that means they are all homeless so he must mean every time they get up from sleeping on the street) they are all shot at like they are in war zones.

 

 

  • Any time he does something that people don’t like and they complain about it then he blames any and everybody else but himself, he doesn’t take responsibility for anything like a child, he just lies about it and tries to either blame Obama for it even though Obama had nothing to do with it or blame the Democrats or blame the courts (the courts) or blame the media and claim it’s a lie, which it’s not or claim it’s fake news, which it’s not, it’s just Trump lying again. Everybody is lying but Trump and he says it’s “unfair”.  Trump even creates his own fake news, for example, a Time magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs, it’s fake.  Sometimes he tries to distract people with something else other than what people are paying attention to, kind of like hey look at the shiny thing over here while he has his people brake into your car and steal all your stuff.  On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow explains that because Donald Trump does not own or value the presidency, the harm his offensive behavior does to the office and the U.S. generally for political gain is not something he cares about.  He only likes the media if one of them asks him nice and easy questions that he likes otherwise he hates them because they expose the truth so he tries to blame them for any and everything he can think of and he calls them “the enemy of the people”, Nixon said “the press is the enemy” and that’s what most fascist dictators say about the media.

And then he tries to use the media to spread propaganda about people he does not like such as immigrants (that’s something Hitler did in the past and other fascist dictators have done and will continue to do).  But Nixon was behind closed doors with his crap, Trump is just out in the open with his crap because he’s not smart enough to be behind closed doors with it.  Fascist dictators always hate the media because they expose the truth, Hitler hated the media and Putin hates the media, Putin dismantled the media in his countryTrump is on step 1; one of the 1st things that fascist dictators do is try to delegitimize the media one way or another because fascist dictators only want the public to know what the fascist dictator wants the public to know but not the truth, never the truth.  That’s why some countries run by fascist dictators have a state run media so the fascist dictators can easily control what the public knows because the fascist dictator is telling the state run media what to say and if they say anything different than what the fascist dictator wants, like the truth, then they end up either in jail or with a bullet in their head, like in Russia and North Korea.  Hopefully Trump will not be able to get that far in the US.  But after Trump has gotten as far as he has I never say never.

 

The news conference came against the backdrop of repeated pressure by Mr. Trump, in public and in private, for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to search harder for people inside the government who have been telling reporters what was happening behind closed doors.

The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have brought to light information ranging from White House infighting and the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders to what surveillance showed about contacts by Mr. Trump’s associates with Russia — and even what Mr. Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office about his firing of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

Not all leaks are illegal, and many of the disclosures about palace intrigue at the White House that have irritated Mr. Trump violated no law.  However, the Espionage Act and several other federal laws do criminalize unauthorized disclosures about certain national security information, like surveillance secrets.  Officials declined to discuss which specific leaks are under investigation or who the suspects may be.

Several advocacy groups for reporters and First Amendment issues sharply criticized the statements made during the news conference, as did Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post.  “Sessions talked about putting lives at risk,” Mr. Baron said.  “We haven’t done that.  What we’ve done is reveal the truth about what administration officials have said and done.  In many instances, our factual stories have contradicted false statements they’ve made.”

Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, said: “There’s a distinction between revelations that make the government uncomfortable and revelations that put lives at risk.  We have not published information that endangers lives.”  The Post and The Times declined to comment about whether the government had contacted them regarding leak investigations.

In a move derided by critics as an attack on the free press, Sessions said the administration was reviewing policies on forcing journalists to reveal their sources.  It is, however, difficult to prosecute members of the news media in the United States for publishing leaked information.  “One of the things we are doing is reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas,” Sessions told reporters as he announced administration efforts to battle what he called a “staggering number of leaks undermining the ability of our government to protect this country.”

A media subpoena is a writ compelling a journalist to testify or produce evidence, with a penalty for failure to do so.  The fact that the administration is reviewing its policy leaves open the possibility of sentencing journalists for not disclosing their sources.  “Every American should be concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to step up its efforts against whistleblowers and journalists,” said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.  “A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters the department was just starting to review the policy on media subpoenas and could not say yet how it might be changed.  But he did not rule out the possibility of threatening journalists with jail time.

When a president starts putting the media in jail, especially en masse, that is step 1 to formally and officially being under the rule of a fascist dictator.  Trump is a fascist dictator, also known as autocracy.  And that is the beginning of the end of the free press and of democracy.

Historically, government employees or contractors who give sensitive information to the media are much more likely to be prosecuted than the reporters who receive it.  U.S. regulations give journalists special protections, barring them from law enforcement that might “reasonably impair newsgathering activities.”

Federal prosecutors must get special permission from the U.S. attorney general before issuing a subpoena to try to force a member of the news media to divulge information to authorities.  New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed in 2005 for refusing to reveal a source about stories on Iraq, but she cut a deal with prosecutors before she was formally charged.  In addressing the wider issue of leaks, Sessions said the Justice Department has tripled the number of investigations into unauthorized leaks of classified information and that four people have already been charged.

It is not illegal to leak information, as such, but divulging classified information is against the law.  Some of the more high-profile leaks in the Trump administration have revealed White House infighting in articles that would appear not to involve divulging classified information.  Sessions did not immediately give the identities of the four people charged, but said they had been accused of unlawfully disclosing classified information or concealing contacts with foreign intelligence officers.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Charlie Savage and Carrie Cordero talk about the Justice Department’s plan, how it could backfire and Trump’s use of the word “leak.”

On All In with Chris Hayes Good leaks, bad leaks.  Which ones are part of the resistance, which ones are a breach of national security?  Dan Rather weighs in.

And on top of the general assault of the media now one has to be careful of what channels they are watching.  Trump has Trump TV  which is basically just propaganda or Trump’s version of state TV.  August 7th 2017 as reported in The Washington Post Kayleigh McEnany, who has been plying her trade as a pro-Trump pundit on CNN for a while, jumped ship to the Trump Team over the weekend.  And Sunday (August 6th 2017), she debuted a Trump TV segment that she labeled the “real news.”  It is real spin, at best.  And it feels a lot like real propaganda — or state TV.  In her first 90-second segment, McEnany makes a number of questionable claims, most notably about the credit President Trump deserves for continued strong economic growth.  In The Washington Post Aaron Blake transcribed the whole segment, with some reality checks interjected.

And Sinclair Broadcast Group is helping that effort with their own version of Trump propaganda taking over your local channels.  And you would not be able to tell that Sinclair Broadcast Group has taken over your local channel because they do not brand them like Fox does.

On All In with Chris Hayes The little-known local news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group forces its stations to run right-wing commentary – and it’s poised to get even bigger.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at UCLA Center for Global Digital Cultures, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about how Donald Trump’s FCC chairman helped pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcasting find a loophole to purchase a huge number of local TV stations, which it is forcing to air right-wing commentaries.

Between Trump attacking the real media and these Trump versions of propaganda or Trump’s version of state TV these are not just assaults on the media but assaults on democracy as a whole.

 

 

Trump’s Cabinet Page

The biggest problem with the Whitehouse is Trump himself.  But like Trump most of his cabinet picks have either little to no experience running a government agency at all or little to no experience in the field of the agency that they were chosen to run.  And it seems that they were chosen to run their respective agencies only to destroy their respective agencies in one way or another.  What could possibly go wrong?

 

  • Attorney General, Jeff Sessions (Confirmed): The former Republican Senator of Alabama.  He is a racist who called an African American attorney a boy.  His former colleagues testified that he used the N-word.  He said the Voting Rights Act was intrusive.  He attacked the NAACP and ACLU and said that they were Communist inspired and un-American for forcing civil rights down the throats of people.  He joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was ok until he found out that they smoked marijuana.  And he referred to a White attorney who took voting rights cases as a traitor to his race.  When Sessions was up for a federal judgeship in 1986, Coretta Scott King, the late widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask them to vote against his appointment.  Both Democrat and Republican Senators considered him too racist for the job at the time.  He has now been confirmed as Attorney General.  I have two questions.  If he was too racist to be a judge then why was he not too racist to be Attorney General?  And if you are not a Caucasian person just how long do you think it will be before your rights are damaged in some way?

 

  • Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos (Confirmed): She is a supporter of poor quality unregulated charter schools and vouchers, not of public schools.  She never went to public schools and neither did her children.  She destroyed the public school system in Michigan.  So I’m sure that she will do her best to destroy the public school system in America.  If Trump wants your children under-educated and the Department of Education destroyed then she is a great choice.

 

  • Energy Secretary, Rick Perry (Confirmed): The former Republican Governor of Texas.  And former Presidential candidate who is a climate change denier that, during a debate, tried to say as President he would eliminate the Department of Energy, but he forgot the name of the department.  This is the man who is now confirmed to run the department that he wanted to get rid of.  Not only did he want to get rid of this department but he didn’t even know what this department did but Trump picked him to run it.  This is another department that Trump is trying to destroy.

 

 

 

 

 

  • Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin (Confirmed): The former Goldman Sachs executive and former OneWest Bank banker known as the “foreclosure king” who bought distressed mortgages and evicted thousands of homeowners during the 2008 financial crisis.

As reported in The Daily Beast:  A New York judge erased $525,000 in mortgage debt owed by a Long Island couple to OneWest Bank in 2009 because the institution was harassing them.  Suffolk County Judge Jeffrey Spinner blasted the bank’s “harsh, repugnant and repulsive” acts as they attempted to toss the family out on the street around Thanksgiving.  Around the same time, Mnuchin’s bank was hounding an 89-year-old widow, attempting to foreclose on her home in California.  Irene Jones, the woman in question, is reported to have said in court that the stress of repeated foreclosure threats from OneWest Bank and its predecessor IndyMac Bank made her husband depressed and contributed to his death.  One-hundred-and-three-year-old Myrtle Lewis ran into such issues with OneWest in 2014.  She accidentally allowed her insurance to lapse, which prompted the bank to attempt to foreclose on her property.  Lewis reinstated her insurance and the bank still didn’t back off.  It is unclear what happened to the property.

 

 

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams How did Donald Trump end up with a man like Steve Bannon working so closely to him in the White House?  Author Joshua Green discusses his new book about Bannon, ‘Devil’s Bargain.’

On All In with Chris Hayes A now-fired NSC staffer wrote the president is under attack from ‘globalists’ and the ‘deep state’ – and the president reportedly loved his work.

August 18th 2017 Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled chief strategist who helped Trump win the 2016 election by embracing their shared nationalist impulses, departed the White House on Friday (August 18th 2017) after a turbulent tenure in which he shaped the fiery populism of the president’s first seven months in office.

Mr. Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shake-ups, came as Mr. Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for the deadly violence at a Virginia rally last week.  Critics of Mr. Bannon accused the president of channeling his chief strategist when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the left-wing protesters who opposed them.

“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.  “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”

A caustic presence in a chaotic West Wing, Mr. Bannon frequently clashed with the president’s other aides as they fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of government.  In an interview this week, Mr. Bannon mocked his colleagues, including Gary D. Cohn, one of the president’s chief economic advisers, saying they were “wetting themselves” out of a fear of radically changing trade policy.

Mr. Trump had recently grown weary of Mr. Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes.  The situation had become untenable, according to advisers close to Mr. Trump who were urging the president to remove Mr. Bannon — and, in turn, people close to Mr. Bannon were urging him to step down — long before Friday.

Mr. Bannon’s removal is a victory for Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel.  Yet Mr. Bannon may still prove to be a confidant for the president, offering advice and counsel from the outside, much like other former advisers who still frequently consult with Mr. Trump.  Mr. Bannon, in particular, had formed a philosophical alliance with Mr. Trump and they shared an unlikely chemistry.

Some White House officials also said Friday they expect some of Bannon’s allies inside the administration to exit with him.  Two such people are national security aide Sebastian Gorka and assistant Julia Hahn, although both have portrayed themselves in recent talks with colleagues as Trump allies first and Bannon allies second.

Despite his ideological similarities with Bannon, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is seen as safe.  He joined the campaign long before Bannon and has his own relationships with the president and other senior advisers.  He has also distanced himself from Bannon in recent weeks.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, a fiery, hard-right news site that has gone to war with the Republican establishment — for months was locked in a long and tortuous battle with senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and a coterie of like-minded senior aides, many with Wall Street ties.

Bannon had been expecting to be cut loose from the White House, people close to him said.  One of them explained that Bannon was resigned to that fate and is determined to continue to advocate for Trump’s agenda on the outside.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii reacts to Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House and Donald Trump’s behavior this week following his defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reviews some of Donald Trump’s weird staff picks, many of whom, it turns out, are united by a connection to Russia, but Steve Bannon, though also a weird choice, has a different explanation for how he got there.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Jane Mayer, staff writer for The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about the role of Robert Mercer in funding Donald Trump and Breitbart, and what he might do next with Steve Bannon out of the white House.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Just hours after it was announced he was out of the administration, Steve Bannon gave an interview where he said the Trump presidency is “over,” and he’s already back at Breitbart.  Ali Velshi discusses with Steve Schmidt, Jonathan Capeheart, and Wil Hylton.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Reports are conflicting over whether Steve Bannon was fired or resigned, but now that he’s gone and back at Breitbart, Bannon says he’s ready to ‘crush the opposition.  ‘ Our panel discusses.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In just 30 weeks in office, Trump’s White House has seen a slew of high-profile staffers cut loose.  Is this proof the chaos candidate will remain the chaos president?  Our panel discusses.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Saying that firing Bannon is just the president is ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Trump Titanic,’ Hawaii Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono says Trump is the big problem at the White House.

 

You can not believe anything Trump says or that any of his people say, Trump does not have a credible bone in his body so people have to watch what he does not what he says because what he says are lies and a lot of it doesn’t even make any sense and he says one thing and then does a 180 degree turn to do something totally different.

July 21st 2017 as reported in the New York Times:  Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned Friday (July 21st 2017) after telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with his appointment of Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier, as his new communications director.  After offering Mr. Scaramucci the job on Friday (July 21st 2017) morning, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Spicer to stay on as press secretary, reporting to Mr. Scaramucci.  But Mr. Spicer rejected the offer, expressing his belief that Mr. Scaramucci’s hiring would add to the confusion and uncertainty already engulfing the White House, according to two people with direct knowledge of the exchange.  Mr. Spicer’s top deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, will serve as press secretary instead.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Two White House Reporters discuss the resignation of Press Secretary Sean Spicer after six months on the job.

On All In with Chris Hayes Back in September 2010, then hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci asked a question at a CNBC town hall with President Obama.  The President did not agree with Scaramucci’s point – far from it – and offered a five-plus minute response to explain why.

“The Daily Show” promoted a video on July 24th 2017 showing the striking similarities between Trump’s and Anthony Scaramucci’s speaking styles.  Scaramucci was named White House director of communications on July 21st.  In the video compilation, Scaramucci is seen mirroring Trump’s body language and hand gestures almost perfectly.  In a tweet promoting the video “The Daily Show” noted: “The Mooch did his homework.”  See the full video here.

So now Scaramucci is fighting with Reince Priebus and Stephen K. Bannon.  As reported in The New York Times:  The internal rivalries of the White House spilled out into stark public view on Thursday (July 27th 2017) as Trump’s new communications director publicly attacked the chief of staff, calling him a “paranoid schizophrenic” leaker and vowing to get him fired.  Anthony Scaramucci, who was installed as White House communications director last week over the objections of the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, in the morning called into CNN to say that the two men were at odds and to dare Mr. Priebus to deny being a leaker.  By the evening, The New Yorker had posted an interview quoting Mr. Scaramucci using vulgar language to describe Mr. Priebus.

White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Wednesday (July 26th 2017) he will contact federal agencies over the “leak” of his financial disclosures, which he called a “felony,” despite the forms being publicly accessible.  “In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony.  I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45” Scaramucci tweeted late Wednesday.  The tweet followed POLITICO’s publication of Scaramucci’s financial disclosures filed in the course of his employment with the Export-Import Bank.  The documents are publicly available on request.  Scaramucci subsequently deleted the tweet and replaced it with another disavowing widespread speculation that his message implied that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus should be investigated.  “Wrong! Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks.  @Reince 45.”

Speaking to CNN’s New Day co-host Chris Cuomo Thursday (July 27th 2017) morning, Scaramucci acknowledged that the documents are available publicly but still denounced leaks.  “I understand the law.  I know that there was a public disclosure mechanism in my financial forms,” he said.  “What I’m upset about is the process and the junk pool, the dirty pool, Chris, in terms of the way this stuff is being done, and the leaking won’t stop.”  The newly appointed White House communications director has made cracking down on White House leaks a staple of his early tenure.  On Tuesday (July 24th 2017), Scaramucci threatened “to fire everybody” to stop the flow of leaks to the press, which have fueled numerous damaging reports about the administration.

On All In with Chris Hayes White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci uses ‘colorful’ language in a tirade against Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams After financial details of new White House Communications boss Anthony Scaramucci leaked to the press, Scaramucci reportedly wants the FBI to investigate if that leak came from Reince Priebus.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams The war in the White House got public and it got ugly with Anthony Scaramucci’s profanity filled interview with one reporter.  Is the White House becoming too dysfunctional to get anything done?  Our panel reacts.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Before even officially becoming Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci went on a threatening, vulgar tirade, attacking fellow White House aides and “leakers.”  Lawrence O’Donnell argues this is a test—if Trump keeps Scaramucci, his presidency may never recover.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Obama Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Bush speechwriter David Frum join Lawrence O’Donnell to explain the deficiencies of the Trump communications team and how Anthony Scaramucci is not only ill-suited to his new role, but also doing far more harm than good.

 

“I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff,” Trump tweeted.  “He is a Great American… and a Great Leader.  John has also done a spectacular job at Homeland Security.  He has been a true star of my Administration.”  Priebus, who had traveled with Trump to Long Island for an event on gang violence, was seated inside a Secret Service van on the tarmac when the message came down.  Sources close to Priebus insisted to CNN throughout the day Friday he was not resigning, leaving the impression the aide was defiantly hanging onto his job amid public shaming by his colleagues.

The move followed months of on-again, off-again speculation that Priebus would soon be ousted from an administration where he has consistently drawn heavy criticism for failing to stem the flow of leaks and struggled to impose a sense of order in a chaotic White House beset by controversies.

Priebus, who was brought on by the outsider President in large part because of his Washington relationships, also wound up carrying a hefty share of the blame for the White House’s legislative stumbles.  Rumors of infighting among Trump’s staff eventually devolved into all-out warfare, bursting dramatically into the open late Thursday (July 27th 2017) with a vulgar screed from incoming communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

 

Kelly had only been retired from the military eight months when Trump tapped him after last November’s election to run his Department of Homeland Security, a position that put Kelly in charge of the administration’s policies on issues including immigration, cybersecurity, countering domestic terrorism and aviation security.

A Marine, Kelly served in the military for nearly five decades and served in positions including chief of Southern Command, senior assistant to the secretary of defense and legislative liaison to Congress, and he served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kelly was born and raised in Boston and graduated from the University of Massachusetts. Kelly’s son, Robert Michael Kelly, was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2010.

This was a major shake-up designed to bring order and military precision to a West Wing beset for six straight months by chaos, infighting and few tangible accomplishments.  With his legislative agenda largely stalled, Trump became convinced that Priebus was a “weak” leader after being lobbied intensely by rival advisers to remove the establishment Republican fixture who has long had friction with some of Trump’s inner-circle loyalists, according to White House officials.

Kelly’s hiring is expected to usher in potentially sweeping structural changes to the turbulent operation and perhaps the departures of some remaining Priebus allies.  Kelly intends to bring some semblance of traditional discipline to the West Wing, where warring advisers have been able to circumvent the chief of staff and report directly to the president and sidestep the policy process, according to people with knowledge of his plans.

Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, earned Trump’s approval for his work combating illegal immigration and his leadership qualities, both in the battlefield and at the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has been talking privately about replacing Priebus with Kelly for several weeks now, though he is an unconventional pick to run the White House considering he has no political or legislative experience.

Trump first tried to offer the chief of staff job to Kelly in mid-May, according to two people familiar with their discussions.  Kelly told the president that he was flattered, but declined, saying he still had more to accomplish beefing up national security and improving immigration enforcement.  Trump did not give up, however.  “The president has tried to convince the general multiple times, and the general has politely declined several times,” said one administration official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.  “But given what’s going on in Washington, I think the president really needs the general to help him restore order in this White House and advance his vision.”

Trump thanked Priebus on Twitter “for his service and dedication to his country.  We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!”

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell New Chief of Staff John Kelly will have to wrangle a man Eugene Robinson calls ‘Mad King Donald’ and his a mediocre staff if he’s to be at all effective.  Will even Kelly end up a casualty of Trump?  Robinson, Peter Wehner, and Chris Whipple join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Just six months in to what has become a chaotic presidency, Reince Priebus is out as Trump’s Chief of Staff.  Our reporter panel shares the latest on his departure.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Can a former four-star Marine general bring some calm to the choppy waters of the Trump White House?  Three men who know the general well join us to discuss.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Before it was announced on Twitter by Trump that Reince Priebus was out as Chief of Staff, he endured vulgar attacks from Trump’s new communications man Anthony Scaramucci.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Will incoming Trump Chief of Staff General John Kelly have better luck than Reince Priebus?  Boston Globe Washington columnist Indira Lakshmanan doesn’t like Kelly’s chances.

If the idea of bringing in General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff is to bring order, control and discipline to the White House, basically to stabilize the White House, well good luck with that.  No one can bring order, control and discipline to this chaos.  This White House is a house teetering on a toothpick, there is no stabilizing this mess and there is only a matter of time before this mess collapses.

But we will see just how far General/Secretary John F Kelly can get before General/Secretary John F Kelly says screw this, I don’t need this headache in my life and leaves himself.

The Anthony Scaramucci stuff is nonsense and just another distraction from the White House to take the focus from the main issues.

 

A White House official said Kelly wanted Scaramucci removed from his new role as the communications director because he did not think he was disciplined and had burned his credibility.  Scaramucci, a colorful and controversial figure, was brought on during the latest in a long list of White House shake ups that have rocked the presidency with a sense of chaos.  Scaramucci is the third White House communications director to leave the post that had been vacant since late May, when Mike Dubke left after about three months on the job.  Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, also assumed some of the communications director role before he resigned when Scaramucci was hired July 21.  Scaramucci’s departure comes days after he unleashed a vulgar tirade against two top White House officials in a conversation with a reporter.

Well General/Secretary John F Kelly passed Lawrence O’Donnell’s first test by getting Anthony Scaramucci out the first day on the job.  Some have said if anybody can do the job General/Secretary John F Kelly can do the job.  Perhaps General/Secretary John F Kelly can stabilize this mess but we will see what happens next.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Jonathan Swan, national political reporter for Axios, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about how Donald Trump managed to dismiss Anthony Scaramucci from the White House communications director position after a record-setting ten days.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell As Lawrence predicted, General John Kelly would have to make an immediate decision on Anthony Scaramucci’s role in the White House but there are still many more tests ahead like who to allow to see the President and who else should be removed from the West Wing.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell John Kelly is already making changes in the White House but as Max Boot says, the President could be the insolvable problem inside the West Wing.  Max Boot, Jeremy Bash and White House Chief of Staff expert Chris Whipple join Lawrence.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Republicans inside and outside the White House worry that Trump will fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions with grave consequences.  Can new Chief of Staff John Kelly prevent that?  Bloomberg’s Al Hunt and The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff join Lawrence.

 

 

  • Senior Adviser to the President, Jared Kushner (Appointed): Dictator Trump has some of his family working for him, as dictators normally do, despite the fact that there are nepotism laws.  Trump gets around the nepotism laws by not having them take salaries.  But I’m sure that they will more than make up for that with huge profits in one thing or another.  Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, both work with Trump.  But Jared Kushner has been put in charge of almost everything.

As reported by The Huffington Post:  Jared Kushner, who comes to Washington with no government experience, no policy experience, no diplomatic experience, and business experience limited to his family’s real estate development firm, a brief stint as a newspaper publisher, and briefly bidding to acquire the Los Angeles Dodgers, will be working on trade, Middle East policy in general, an Israel-Palestine peace deal more specifically, reforming the Veterans Administration, and solving the opioid crisis.  Oh wait, that’s not all! Apparently, this new office will also be responsible for “modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodeling workforce-training programs; and developing “transformative projects” under the banner of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband internet service to every American.”  We have certainly come a long way from “I alone can fix it.”, The Huffington Post said.

 

  • I do not include Trump’s entire cabinet here, only certain, generally the most notable, members of it. If you wish view the rest of his cabinet here are links to websites for that.  The New York Times, The Atlantic’s Cabinet Tracker and The Guardian.  And by the way, Trump is not draining any swamp, Trump has done nothing more than add bigger gators to the swamp and made the swamp bigger. So for all you “drain the swamp” people out there, you can forget that.

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries are growing exasperated at how slowly the White House is moving to fill hundreds of top-tier posts, warning that the vacancies are hobbling efforts to oversee agency operations and promote the president’s agenda, according to administration officials, lawmakers and lobbyists.  The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts.  But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees, according to data tracked by The Washington Post and the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition.  These posts include the deputy secretaries and undersecretaries, chief financial officers, ambassadors, general counsels, and heads of smaller agencies who run the government day-to-day.  Trump is criticizing Democrats for not approving his nominees, but Trump himself has named few candidates.  As part of a Monday morning tweetstorm, Trump posted that Democrats “are taking forever” to confirm his nominees, including ambassadors.  Trump tweets: “They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS! Want approvals.”  But Trump has yet to name candidates for dozens of ambassadorships.  Currently, only five nominated candidates remain unconfirmed.

 

 

TrumpCare Page

 

  • If you didn’t like or couldn’t afford ObamaCare then you really wouldn’t like the Trump Republican version, let’s call it TrumpCare, because it will cost you a lot more upfront. I’ve heard between 15% to 25% higher, I’ve also heard between $1,500. and $5,000. more per year.  And if you drop healthcare and try to get it again it will cost you even more, by 30%.  The subsidies (the help to get healthcare insurance) for middle and moderate income people will be a lot less, in most cases not enough help to actually get healthcare insurance (I heard 1 example of if you got a $10,000. subsidy under ObamaCare then that would drop to $4,000. under Trump Care) and they are freezing Medicaid expansion for lower and low income people so some of them will be just left out in the cold, some would have to decide whether to eat or see a doctor.  Certain people will get tax credits although the rates will go by age not income but still some how the rich people will get the biggest tax breaks and middle, moderate and lower income people will end up paying more in taxes.  All this may be fine for people 20 years old but for people 40 years old and older not so much; older people would have less healthcare and pay more for it.  Even though Trump lied and said people would not lose coverage 14 million people by 2018 and 24 million people over time who have healthcare now would lose healthcare.  So that means that all the 20 million people who got healthcare under ObamaCare that never had it before plus 4 million more people that did have healthcare before ObamaCare would lose healthcare.  They say everyone will have access to healthcare but access is not the same as having healthcare, I have access to a dozen houses but that doesn’t mean that I can get them or have them.  Even people in Trump’s own party hate Trump Care.

 

In the final 24 hours before the final vote that Trump and Ryan demanded for 3/24/17 the Republicans removed services, which were Essential Health Benefits under Obama Care, from TrumpCare making it legal for insurance companies to not cover the services in the following list even if you already have insurance in a final attempt to get TrumpCare passed in the House by the House Freedom Caucus formerly known as the Tea Party Caucus Republicans:

  • Outpatient Care
  • Emergency Services
  • Hospitalization
  • Pregnancy, Maternity and Newborn Care
  • Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disorder Services
  • Prescription Drugs
  • Rehabilitative and Habilitative
  • Laboratory Services
  • Preventive Services
  • Pediatric Services

The House Freedom Caucus formerly known as the Tea Party Caucus Republicans still would not vote for TrumpCare even though removing those services removed so much from healthcare that there would not be anything left; people basically would be giving money away to insurance companies for doing absolutely nothing.  Why would anybody want to pay any insurance company for this?  It does not cover anything at all and yet, some how, it will still cost people more money.  So obviously the House Freedom Caucus formerly known as the Tea Party Caucus Republican’s answer to healthcare is none at all.  This is why Ryan pulled the bill from the House floor without voting on it and ObamaCare remains the law of the land until the Republicans do something else, stay tuned, now is not the time to stop paying attention.

 

 

 

TrumpCare still has several steps to go before people get stuck with this mess so don’t panic and freak out just yet.

  1. Just the 1st step was passing in the House.
  2. TrumpCare would still have to get passed in the Senate and some say that this version of TrumpCare is Dead On Arrival in the Senate; the Senators are saying they will change TrumpCare.  So if the Senate changes TrumpCare then 2nd the Senate would have to pass their version of TrumpCare.
  3. Then 3rd there is a House and Senate Conference Committee to reconcile the differences between the Senate version of TrumpCare and the House version of TrumpCare and combine the two versions, then that results in a brand new 3rd version of TrumpCare.
  4. Then 4th that combined version would have to pass the House again.
  5. Then 5th that combined version would have to pass the Senate again.
  6. Before 6th getting signed by Trump and becoming law.

And a lot of bills do not even make it through all of that, some die in the Senate or at some other point along the way.

Rachel Maddow makes several points about TrumpCare.  The same day the House voted for this abomination of a healthcare bill Trump told Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, “I shouldn’t say this to the great gentleman, my friend from Australia, because they have better healthcare than we do”.  Bernie Sanders, for one, was highly amused by Trump’s unlikely declaration of support for Australia’s health care system.  Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Sanders laughed after watching the footage of Trump speaking to Turnbull.  “The President has just said it!” Sanders said. “That’s great! Let’s take a look at the Australian health care system. And let’s move. Maybe he wants to look at the Canadian health system. Or systems throughout Europe. Thank you, Mr. President!”  Of course Australia has better healthcare than we do; Australia and most civilized countries have single-payer universal healthcare because healthcare is, to most civilized countries and should be to the US, a right not a product for the privileged few.  We will see what happens next, stay tuned, now is not the time to stop paying attention.

 

  • Even Trump calls the House health care bill ‘mean’.  But that hasn’t made any impression on the Senate Republicans because while everyone has been focused on testimonies in the House Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian interference in the 2016 US election the Senate Republicans have used that opportunity for something else.  The Senate Republicans have been litigating their health care bill in secret.  Now, Republican lawmakers say the public will only be able to see the Senate’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) replacement plan when they can secure the 51 votes needed to pass their bill.  In other words, when it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.

Here on All In with Chris Hayes 6/13/17 Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Republican Bill Cassidy for information about the GOP health care bill that’s being drafted in secret.

Here on The Rachel Maddow Show Chuck Schumer, top Senate Democrat, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Republicans are hiding the drafting of their version of an Obamacare replacement.

Here on All In with Chris Hayes a small group of Senate Republicans won’t show the secret health care bill to Democrats, the public, or even many Republicans.  And they can’t even explain what it’s supposed to do.

Senate Democrats say they’re prepared to obstruct as much of the chamber’s business as they can to force Senate Republicans open up their health care debate to the public.  The maneuver is an escalation in the Senate’s debate on repealing and replacing Obamacare.  Republicans are developing their health care plan in secret, completely forgoing the usual process of holding public committee hearings and having experts testify about proposed legislation.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made the calculation that it’s better to have a secretive process and rush a bill to the floor, given the House’s raucous, if abbreviated, debate and the deep unpopularity of its bill.  Some Republican senators have blanched at the behind-closed-doors process, but haven’t committed to voting against the bill in protest.  Democrats had been reluctant to shut the Senate down, as they do have some power to do, but today’s news marks a notable change in tactics for the minority.  Democrats can’t completely stop the Senate’s business or prevent Republicans from producing a secret health care plan and trying to rush it to the floor.  But they can make the process more painful by blocking routine Senate business, as Vox’s Jeff Stein wrote recently.  The move also helps draw attention to the almost-unprecedented opacity being deployed by the GOP.

We do know this: There will likely be legislation for Republicans to view the week ending June 23rd.  Much of its largest outlines will mimic the House version passed in May.  Parts of it will be different.  It’s almost certain to result in millions fewer Americans having insurance.  It will also enact big savings for Medicaid.  Here’s what we know so far, and what we don’t, about the emerging bill:

1. The bill’s 50-vote pathway to passage is most likely to circumvent Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the two senators at each end of their party’s spectrum.  Collins, a moderate, was the only Republican currently in Congress to vote against an Obamacare repeal bill in 2015, and the libertarian-minded Paul was the only one in his party to oppose a budget resolution earlier this year kicking off the whole process.  If that’s the case, McConnell will have to get every single other Republican on board in the closely divided Senate (and that’s counting on Vice President Pence as a tie-breaker), including Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has lately been displaying her displeasure at how the whole health-care effort is unfolding.

2. The Senate measure seems poised to enact deeper Medicaid cuts than the House bill.  The Senate bill is shaping up not only to convert Medicaid to a leaner per-capita funding system, but also tie its growth rate to an even slower-growing index than under the House version (the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers, instead of what’s known as CPI-Medical).  Conservative senators, most prominently Senator Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), love this idea.

3. The Senate legislation is likely to gradually phase down the Affordable Care Act’s higher federal payments for the expanded Medicaid population.  The phase down could take three years, or maybe longer.  This would be a concession to moderates who don’t want to look like they’re pushing people off Medicaid too abruptly.

4. The measure seems ready to repeal or delay some or all of the ACA’s taxes.  The levies that might be repealed include the ACA’s health-insurance tax and a tax on medical devices, two revenue streams the industry has vigorously lobbied to eliminate.  But lawmakers have yet to make a final decision on that front.  Much of the final verdict will have to do with how much funding they need to free up in order to pay for the bill’s ultimate benefits.

5. The Senate bill is likely to include a more generous version of insurance subsidies, tying them not just to age as in the House bill, but also to income.

6. The measure will likely exclude language banning federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions.  The Senate parliamentarian has yet to make a final decision on whether such language is allowed under budget reconciliation rules.  But from what we’re hearing, even antiabortion advocates for such a ban acknowledge it’s not likely to pass muster under the so-called “Byrd rules” governing what can go in the Senate bill.

Here’s something else we know: Democrats are doing all they can to get in the way.  They ultimately can’t block Republicans from passing a health-care bill, since all the GOP needs is a simple majority using budget rules.

 

Senate Republicans’ proposal to rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) would scale back federal funding for Medicaid, change the subsidies available to help low- and moderate-income people buy private insurance, end the mandate that most people buy insurance and repeal taxes that helped expand coverage to about 20 million Americans.  Here’s USA Today’s look at how the bill released June 22nd could affect you.

It’s part Obamacare-replace, part sweeping-Medicaid-overhaul.  Senate Republican leaders posted their 142-page health care proposal.  (Read the full bill here on PBS).  It is, notably, a “draft” bill, meaning that now Republicans will negotiate among themselves before an expected vote next week.  “We’re going to make a lot of changes over the next seven days,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told reporters.  But this is the key starting point.  Here is our initial look at what the Senate bill proposes on PBS.

Former President Barack Obama posted a blistering attack on the Republican-sponsored Senate bill that would significantly change his signature health-care law, calling it a “massive transfer of wealth” from the middle-class and poor to the richest Americans.  “The Senate bill … is not a health care bill,” Obama wrote in a long Facebook message issued hours after the bill was unveiled.  “It hands enormous tax cuts to the rich and to the drug and insurance companies, paid for by cutting health care for everybody else.”  Obama wrote that the bill will lead to higher insurance premiums for people enrolled in private individual insurance plans, as well as larger out-of-pocket health costs.  “Simply put, if there’s a chance you might get sick, get old, or start a family — this bill will do you harm,” Obama wrote.  The former president, who left office in January, also called on Republicans to reconsider their effort to undo the Affordable Care Act.  Read Obama’s entire Facebook post here on CNBC.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow tells the history of ADAPT and the activism of disabled Americans and points out the leadership role these activists have taken in challenging the Republican plan to take Medicaid away from millions.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Senator Chris Murphy talks with Rachel Maddow about the Republican tactic to try to quickly push their health bill through hoping Americans won’t notice, and the importance of public feedback, particularly to persuadable Republicans.

On All In with Chris Hayes The Senate health care bill is a repudiation of every promise the president made to the American public about his approach to the health care system.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t yet have the votes for the health care bill that cuts Medicaid and four GOP senators haven’t committed to voting yes.  Neera Tanden and Adam Jentleson join Lawrence O’Donnell.

The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors’ group, opposes the Senate health care bill, the organization announced in a letter to Senate leaders June 26th.  “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm.’  The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels,” American Medical Association CEO James Madara wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).  “It seems highly likely that a combination of smaller subsidies resulting from lower benchmarks and the increased likelihood of waivers of important protections such as required benefits, actuarial value standards, and out of pocket spending limits will expose low and middle income patients to higher costs and greater difficulty in affording care,” the AMA’s letter says.

The legislation would make tax credits for private health insurance created by the Affordable Care Act available to fewer people, reduce their value and tie them to plans that have larger deductibles and higher out-of-pocket costs than the policies sold under Affordable Care Act rules.  The bill also would permit states to make sweeping changes to insurance market rules, which would allow insurers to offer very skimpy plans that don’t come with a basic set of guaranteed benefits and that could exclude treatments and medicines for people with high-cost ailments.

The AMA’s letter is particularly scathing when it comes to the GOP’s efforts to reduce Medicaid spending by imposing cap on federal spending.  “The Senate proposal to artificially limit the growth of Medicaid expenditures below even the rate of medical inflation threatens to limit states’ ability to address the health care needs of their most vulnerable citizens,” the letter says.  “It would be a serious mistake to lock into place another arbitrary and unsustainable formula that will be extremely difficult and costly to fix.”  Read the AMA’s full letter here.  Trump told senators the House bill was “mean” and he wanted the Senate bill to have more “heart.”  I guess this is all the heart the Republicans could muster up.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Ezra Levin, co-founder of the “Indivisible” movement, talks with Rachel Maddow about the growth in reach of Indivisible activism, the success of organizing public outcry over Republican health care reform, and why Mitch McConnell drafted the Senate bill in secrecy.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell talks to Ezra Klein about the “catastrophic” CBO report – which estimates 22 million people would lose health care coverage – and GOP Representative David Jolly shares his personal story of what happened when he found himself unemployed and uninsured.

Senate Republican leaders are postponing a vote on their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare after a critical mass of senators said they would block the bill as written.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been pushing for a vote by the end of the week, and he could only lose 2 votes. But by Tuesday (June 27th) afternoon, at least five Republican senators said they would not support a procedural vote to start debate on the bill as currently written, enough to stop it.  “We’re going to continue the discussions within our conference on the differences that we have,” McConnell said at a press conference Tuesday (June 27th) afternoon. “We’re going to continue to try and litigate — consequently we will not be on the bill this week, but we’re still working toward getting at least 50 people in a comfortable place.”  A temporary reprieve but the people need to keep up the pressure.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Senator McConnell delayed a vote on the Senate GOP health care bill after 9 senators come out against it.  But Lawrence O’Donnell explains the real reason Senator McConnell pulled the bill: that the real number against the bill was probably higher – a lot higher.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell explains why the Senate Majority Leader took a big gamble on the repeal and replace bill—and whether the Resistance will succeed in stopping it.  Joy Reid and John Heilemann discuss.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Senator Cory Booker talks with Rachel Maddow about the public activism that contributed to the Republican failure to pass their health/tax plan and why it’s too soon for opponents of the Republican bill to celebrate.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at continued activism against Republican dismantling of health benefits even as Senate Republicans have failed in their first effort to bring a bill of their own.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Chris Hayes talks with Rachel Maddow about the key to the success or failure of the Republican health/tax bill: whether Republicans from Medicaid expansion states care about their constituents.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Bernie Sanders joins All In as Senate Republicans scramble to revise their health care bill, on the day the CBO says that bill will be even worse than previously thought.

June 30th 2017 Trump tweeted:  “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”  That move would probably leave 18 million more people without coverage in the first year after its enactment and 32 million more by 2026, according to a Congressional Budget Office report that looked at an earlier GOP bill to repeal Obamacare.  It would also cause premiums on individual market policies to increase by up to 25% the first year and to nearly double by 2026.  All this would happen mainly because the individual mandate — which requires nearly all Americans to get coverage or pay a penalty — would be repealed.  But some insurers would also likely pull out of the market, the CBO said.  The remaining carriers would likely raise rates dramatically because the remaining enrollees would tend to be older and sicker.

This is one reason why Republican lawmakers in both the House and the Senate moved away from a straight repeal of Obamacare without a replacement bill.  That left insurers, consumers and other Republican members in a tizzy.  Only 19% of Americans supported repealing Obamacare first and replacing later, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released in March.  That hasn’t stopped some conservative GOP members from pushing for a full repeal.  Both Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rand Paul of Kentucky have recently broached the topic with Trump, likely leading to his tweet Friday (June 30th) morning.  While senators are expected to ignore Trump’s suggestion, it does inject more uncertainty into the future of Obamacare and the individual market.  And that’s the last thing insurers need.  Already, many are raising rates or even dropping out of the individual market completely for 2018.  Some 36 counties in Nevada, Ohio and Indiana are at risk of having no carrier on their exchanges next year, according to Kaiser.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on protests around the country and in the nation’s capital to pressure Republican senators to reject the proposed Republican health care/tax bill to replace Obamacare.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports that Senate Republicans will try again to pass their Unpopular Obamacare-replacing health care/tax bill, even pushing into two weeks of their August vacation.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell weighs in on Trump’s sit-back-and-wait approach to passing major health care legislation.  And Ezra Klein explains why he thinks the newest GOP bill “is terrible for anyone who is sick, has been sick, or will be sick.”

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on health care activists using a printed “flat Rob” to send a message to Ohio Senator Rob Portman.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Frank Thorp, NBC News Capitol Hill producer, talks with Rachel Maddow about Senators Mike Lee and Jerry Moran rejecting the Republican health bill, putting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell below the threshold he needs to pass the bill without working with Democrats.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Senators Mike Lee and Jerry Moran announce their opposition to the Republican health care plan, effectively killing the bill.  But this “zombie bill” has come back to life before—will it be resurrected?  Julie Rovner, David Frum and Ron Klain join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Supporters of Obamacare tirelessly attended town halls and made their voices heard—and Republican senators responded to the constituent pressure.  Trumpcare is dead – for now.  Neera Tanden and Indivisible’s Ezra Levin join Lawrence O’Donnell.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Planned Parenthood was key in building the resistance to GOP health care bill by organizing protests and helping get the bill’s opponents to town hall meetings.  Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards joins Lawrence O’Donnell in an exclusive interview.

On All In with Chris Hayes The president refuses to take responsibility for the failure of the Republican Obamacare repeal effort – despite playing a big role in that failure.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Bernie Sanders reacts to the Republican-led Senate’s failure to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: So far, every time President Donald Trump climbs into a truck in front of the cameras, a Republican health care bill dies.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Calling for bipartisan action, Senate Democrat Amy Klobuchar joins MSNBC’s Brian Williams to react to the major collapse of the Republican Health Care bill on Capitol Hill.

On All In with Chris Hayes The president threatens and cajoles Republican senators as the CBO says the new, repeal-only plan will leave 32 million people uninsured and double premiums.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell translates what Mitch McConnell told President Donald Trump today after Trump invited all Republican senators to the White House to discuss the Senate’s floundering health care legislation.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Former congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) joins Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about Trumpcare, the importance of presidential leadership in passing legislation, and Trump’s public attack on Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to open debate on a health care bill next week.  What exactly is in the bill is a little hard to say right now – even for the people casting the votes.

July 24th 2017 as reported in The Washington Post:  The Senate Republican drive to pass a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s health-care laws took another unexpected turn late Monday when the office of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced he would return to Washington for a planned Tuesday vote.  McCain, who was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, could provide a critical vote to open debate on the GOP bill.  The senator had been recuperating from surgery and exploring treatment options in Arizona.

McCain’s announcement came as some Senate GOP leaders expressed confidence in a newly emerging strategy of trying to pass smaller-scale changes to the Affordable Care Act, with an eye toward continue negotiations into the fall.  While it was unclear if McCain’s return would improve the chances of the bill clearing a key procedural hurdle as he has expressed concerns about the proposal.  But some Republicans were privately abuzz with speculation that leaders might be close to securing the votes they needed to at least keep alive a months-long effort that all but died last week.

July 24th 2017 as reported in The New York Times:  Before Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, announced that he was jetting in to cast what is expected to be a vote in favor of starting debate, Trump spent Monday ratcheting up pressure on Republican senators to get onboard.  Mr. Trump criticized their inaction and warned that they risked betraying seven years’ worth of promises to raze and revamp the health law if they did not.  “Remember ‘repeal and replace,’ ‘repeal and replace’ — they kept saying it over and over again,” Mr. Trump said at the White House, flanked by people who he said suffered as “victims” of the “horrible disaster known as Obamacare.”  “Every Republican running for office promised immediate relief from this disastrous law,” the president said.  “But so far, Senate Republicans have not done their job in ending the Obamacare nightmare.”

Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, countered, “No matter how many ways President Trump tries to twist or hide the truth, the facts won’t change: The Affordable Care Act has been a lifesaver for millions of Americans.”  The remarks from Mr. Trump, who has been largely absent from the policy debate, had the ring of a threat by a president who has grown frustrated watching Republicans repeatedly try, and fail, to reach consensus on his campaign promise to immediately roll back the health law and enact a better system.

Trump said their constituents would exact a price for inaction — “you’ll see that at the voter booth, believe me” — and hinted that any Republican who did not support the bid to open debate on an as-yet-determined health bill would be painted as complicit in preserving a health law passed on the basis of “a big, fat, ugly lie.”  “For Senate Republicans, this is their chance to keep their promise,” Mr. Trump said, repeating the “repeal and replace” mantra on which Republicans campaigned last fall.  “There’s been enough talk and no action; now is the time for action.”  After months of planning, debating and legislating, much of it behind closed doors, the Senate this week has reached the moment when votes will have to be cast.  The big question Monday was what exactly the Senate will be voting on.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell explains why Senator John McCain would violate the principles he laid out last week if he votes to proceed to debate on the GOP health care bill when he returns to the Senate on Tuesday.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Senator Ron Wyden talks with Rachel Maddow about the need for Americans to make their objections to the Republican repeal of Obamacare known, as Republicans prepare to vote on whatever bill Mitch McConnell presents to them.

On All In with Chris Hayes Mitch McConnell is scrambling to get something – anything – on the floor, but no one actually knows what’s in the bill they might be voting on.  Senator Chris Murphy joins Chris Hayes to discuss.

 

The Senate vote will allow debate to begin on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. 

How Senators Voted to Consider the Republican Health Care Bill »
Majority needed to pass    Yes   No
Republicans                          51     2
Democrats                             0       48
Total                                       51     50

Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Dean Heller of Nevada and Rob Portman of Ohio, three Republicans who have expressed profound doubts about legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, announced Tuesday they will vote to begin debate on the future of health care.  See a full vote tally here, how each senator voted on motion to proceed with debate on the GOP health care bill Tuesday (July 25th 2017) afternoon.

 

How Senators Voted on Repeal and replace amendment »
Majority needed to pass    Yes   No

Republicans                          43     9
Democrats                             0       48
Total                                       43     57

See a full vote tally here, how each senator voted on the Better Care Reconciliation Act (TrumpCare) on Tuesday (July 25th 2017) night.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell argues Senator John McCain’s dramatic return to the Senate and his vote to move forward with the GOP health care bill isn’t a violation of his principles, but rather a signal about how he’ll vote on whichever bill Mitch McConnell brings to a vote.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams While blasting the process used to draft the GOP health care bill and calling for bipartisanship and civility on Capitol Hill, a returning John McCain also voted to move forward on the GOP plan.

 

How Senators Voted on Partial repeal amendment »
Majority needed to pass    Yes   No
Republicans                          45     7
Democrats                             0       48
Total                                       45     55

See a full vote tally here, how each senator voted on the Obamacare Repeal and Reconciliation Act on Wednesday (July 26th 2017).

Here’s how different versions of the bill would impact Americans.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In what critics call another ‘stinging defeat’ on health care, Republicans failed to pass a bill repealing Obamacare without a measure to replace it.  Charlie Sykes & Kimberly Atkins discuss.

July 26th 2017 In another vote, the Senate decided on party lines, 52-48, to block a Democratic motion that would order legislators to return the bill to committee with instructions not to include any Medicaid cuts.  Spending reductions to Medicaid are a major piece of the House bill and various Senate replacement proposals.  Things are subject to change as Senate leaders in both parties work out a schedule.  But one thing you can count on is more debate:  There’s supposed to be 20 hours before a final vote.  Republicans can speed things up a bit by yielding their time.

When the debate is done, the Senate moves on to what is unofficially called the “Vote-a-Rama,” possibly as early as Thursday (July 27th 2017).  During this period, senators from both parties can offer an unlimited number of amendments which are voted on without debate.  This would be a chance for individual Republicans to present their own Obamacare replacement bills, which are unlikely to pass, as well as smaller policy proposals.  For example, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has been pushing an amendment to block-grant health care funding to states.  Democrats could use this period to offer amendments that might provide fodder for future political attacks, like measures that would undo unpopular cuts.  Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., has already submitted over 100 amendments, many of which would require that any bill not affect specific groups like Iraq veterans, pregnant women, and patients battling numerous individually listed forms of cancer.  But there are limits:  Their amendments have to be relevant to the bill and they can’t increase the deficit.  They also can’t use the process to filibuster a bill by speaking indefinitely.

As of Wednesday (July 26th 2017) night, Republicans had not announced what final legislation they planned to vote on.  The most prominent idea being floated right now is a “skinny repeal” bill that would eliminate Obamacare’s requirements that individuals buy insurance and employers provide it, along with the law’s medical-device tax.  The bill would be compiled through amendments in the “Vote-a-Rama,” possibly in a substitute amendment at the end that’s backed by Senate leaders.  If the House passes the same skinny repeal bill as the Senate, it goes to the president’s desk, and it becomes law.  This could cause serious disruption in insurance markets and some Republicans sound wary about the idea.

Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn freely admits it: the whole strategy guiding the Senate this week is passing any damned thing they can so that they can take it to the House in conference, then cook up whatever they feel like—with a minimum of input from anyone outside of that room.

Oh, okay, says the rank-and file, or in his case just Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker.  The “content” of it doesn’t matter, because it is the “forcing mechanism” for conference with House.  There’s Corker happily ceding any say in this at all to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and the House maniacs.  He’s not alone.  Nevada Senator Dean Heller says “I look on it … favorably.  It’s good for the state of Nevada.”  Heller appears to be operating under the assumption—or trying to make his constituents believe—that it means there won’t be any Medicaid cuts if this passes.  Either he’s truly an idiot or he thinks his constituents are, because those Medicaid cuts aren’t going away.  What’s going to happen is that the conference committee will put them back in and McConnell will beat on Heller until he gives in and votes for the final bill.  That’s certainly what McConnell has in mind.  Heller should know better by now.

On All In with Chris Hayes The CBO reports the so-called ‘Skinny Repeal’ of Obamacare would leave 16 million more Americans uninsured by 2026 and increase premiums by 20% more on average.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams As the Senate readies for a late night vote to try to pass a so-called ‘skinny repeal’ of Obamacare, former members of Congress David Jolly (R-FL) & Donna Edwards (D-MD) join to discuss.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who was recently diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer, shares her perspective on the fight over health care reform.

On All In with Chris Hayes After Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski voted against a motion to begin debating the Republican health care bill, members of the Trump administration responded with threats against residents of her state.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow points out the parallels between the bully tactics at the root of the Bridgegate scandal and the pressure Donald Trump is trying to put on Senator Lisa Murkowski by threatening Alaska, noting also that Chris Christie’s former campaign manager now works as Trump’s political director.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Senator Al Franken talks with Rachel Maddow about the disastrous health/tax bill Senate Republicans are struggling to jam through to passage.

On All In with Chris Hayes The Republican Party is dominated by the far right wing ‘Koch brothers ideology,’ says Senator Bernie Sanders, and they want to eliminate ‘every federal program passed in the last eighty years.’

 

But just hours away from a vote, it was still unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had garnered the 50 “yes” votes needed to pass it.  The most notable holdout was McCain, who had made a dramatic return to Washington after brain cancer surgery this week in part to cast this vote.  McCain and several of his colleagues had thrown the Republican negotiations into turmoil earlier in the day, when they threatened to scuttle the bill unless they were offered guarantees that the House would enter negotiations after the Senate passed the bill.

The drama — Republican senators imploring their own colleagues across the Capitol to vow that they would not pass the bill they are about to pass — crystalized the remarkable dissatisfaction and deep reservations that Republican members feel about weakening Obamacare and threatened the prospect of providing a long-awaited legislative victory to the party and Donald Trump.  “Go Republican Senators, Go!  Get there after waiting for 7 years.  Give America great healthcare!”  Trump tweeted late Thursday.

After a phone call with House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Senators Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson said they had received the reassurances they needed and would vote yes.  But McCain was uncharacteristically silent as he left the Senate chamber.  “I think John is rightfully upset with the process and whatever he does, he’s earned the right to do it,” Graham told reporters.  Earlier in the evening, Graham and his colleagues had savaged the “skinny repeal” bill.  “I’m not going to vote for a bill that is terrible policy and politics just to get something done,” Graham said at a press conference.  Joined by McCain, Johnson and Bill Cassidy, Graham said he has grown increasingly concerned that contrary to GOP leaders’ assurances, the bill that the Senate passes would be immediately taken up by the House — rather than going to a House-Senate conference for further negotiations — and end up on Trump’s desk.  “We have to have an assurance that it will go to a normal conference — right now that is not the case.”

Shortly after that press conference, Ryan responded that the House would be willing to go to a conference committee but his carefully crafted statement did not include a specific guarantee that the House would not vote on the Senate’s proposal.  It appeared aimed at moving the process forward while protecting House Republicans from being blamed if the entire process collapses.  “The burden remains on the Senate to demonstrate that it is capable of passing something that keeps our promise, as the House has already done,” Ryan said.  “Until the Senate can do that, we will never be able to develop a conference report that becomes law.”

How Senators Voted On “Skinny” repeal amendment »
Majority needed to pass    Yes   No
Republicans                          49     3
Democrats                             0       48
Total                                       49     51

See a full vote tally here, how each senator voted on the Health Care Freedom Act on Friday (July 28th 2017).

The Senate rejected a third Republican proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act early Friday morning.  The “skinny” repeal amendment, called the Health Care Freedom Act, would have repealed the mandates that most individuals have health insurance and that large employers cover their employees, among other provisions.

On All In with Chris Hayes The gasps on the floor, the staredown, the reactions – Chris Hayes breaks down the dramatic scenes from the vote that killed the Republican health care bill.

On All In with Chris Hayes Lawrence O’Donnell joins Chris Hayes to recap the stunning week that was in Washington.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell John McCain made the deciding vote on the GOP’s health care bill and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were “unwavering in their opposition.”  But protesters around the country had the courage to do more than their jobs in fighting to save healthcare for 23 million.

This appears to end repeal and replace and/or repeal only and/or skinny repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), for now.  They said they are moving on to something else.  But keep an eye on them and do not put it past them to bring this back to life at some point later.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Democrats and Republicans took a step forward towards new health care legislation with a new bipartisan effort.  Senator Chris Murphy joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the Senate Health committee’s plan, as well as what lies ahead for possible Russian sanctions.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Joy-Ann Reid shares video of angry constituents confronting members of Congress, who are home now on a month-long vacation, over their vote for the wildly unpopular Republican health care bill.

 

 

Trump The Man Page

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell There is renewed interest in the 25th Amendment after Trump’s recent tweet attacks.  Lawrence O’Donnell talks to psychiatrist Dr. Prudence Gourguechon who evaluates Trump’s recent behavior using criteria set forth in the US Army Field Manual.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Former Senator Gordon Humphrey left the GOP the day after Trump was elected.  After Trump’s “dangerous” rhetoric on North Korea, he tells Lawrence O’Donnell why “Trump should be relieved of the powers of the presidency at the earliest date” under the 25th Amendment.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss Donald Trump’s “dangerous” inability “to think and speak clearly” and what Americans must do about it.  And here you can read George F. Will’s full article ‘Trump has a dangerous disability’ in the Washington Post.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell points out the President is making claims about his campaign’s ties to Russia that directly contradict other claims he’s made about his campaign’s ties to Russia.  The White House is doing everything it can to manage that.

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump’s daily ‘propaganda document’.  The president ‘gets a folder full of positive news about himself twice a day,’ according to a report from Vice News.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell VICE reports White House staff prepare a 20-page “propaganda document” twice a day for Trump with positive tweets, cable news screenshots, and sometimes pictures of him.  Former WH Press Secretary Josh Earnest and WH correspondent Eli Stokols join Lawrence O’Donnell.

 

Trump thinks the National Enquirer and Alex Jones’s Info Wars and Breitbart News are real news, they are made up fake news.  As examples of Alex Jones’s Info Wars fake news Alex Jone was spreading the fake news about a child sex ring at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria after an armed man stormed the place looking for victims.  Then Alex Jones moved the fake child sex ring to Mars and claimed NASA was running it.  To make sure this conspiracy theory didn’t catch fire, NASA was forced to deny it.  Seriously, did anyone actually believe that NASA was running a child sex slave colony on Mars?  There are no humans even on Mars.

 

 

And on June 15th 2017 Trump tweeted: “Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?”  What?  Who is going to believe that Hillary and the Democrats had the Russians hack their own campaign and the election?  Here on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Indira Lakshmanan, Jeff Mason, and Eugene Robinson react to Trump’s tweets attempting to turn the Russia probe into a discussion about Hillary Clinton.

But Hillary is certainly not the only woman Trump attacks.  June 29th 2017 Trump attacked MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski on Twitter.  In the 1st tweet Trump tweeted “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..”.  In the 2nd tweet Trump tweeted “…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”.  Photos of Brzezinski at the time show that not only was she not bleeding from anywhere on her face but she had not had a facelift (and what is it with Trump repeatedly referring to women bleeding from somewhere?).

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Trump once again showed his true character in a vulgar attack on Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski, another self-inflicted problem as he struggles to implement his agenda.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Ambassador Wendy Sherman tells Lawrence O’Donnell that Donald Trump’s latest Twitter attack proves he is not ready to represent America on the world stage.  Annie Karni and Ana Marie Cox also join.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The investigation into Donald Trump is often compared to Watergate, but President Nixon proved surprisingly resilient… until he was forced to resign.  New York Magazine’s Frank Rich joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss how long it took, and how Trump compares to Nixon.

The morning after being viciously attacked by Trump on Twitter, MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski said she wasn’t exactly reeling as a result of the president’s vulgar and deeply personal social-media assault.  But on “Morning Joe” on June 30th, Brzezinski said she is worried about what Trump’s tweets seem to reveal about him.  “I’m fine,” she said. “My family brought me up really tough.  This is absolutely nothing for me personally.  But I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States.  It’s strange.”  She added: “It does worry me about the country.”  Her co-host, Joe Scarborough, said he and Brzezinski had heard from numerous friends and relatives since the president’s attack.  “We had so many people saying, ‘Hey, hope you’re okay,’” he said June 30th.  “… We’re okay.  The country is not.”

But the feud between Trump and the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, did not end there it escalated on June 30th.  Scarborough said June 30th that three top White House staffers told him Trump could arrange to “spike” a negative story about him in the National Enquirer if Scarborough would call the president and apologize for his negative coverage of Trump.  He described the White House officials as “three people at the very top of the administration.”  “They said if you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story,” Scarborough said.  Scarborough said his response was, “Like ‘are you kidding me. I don’t know what they have, run a story, I’m not going to do it,’ Scarborough said.  “The calls kept coming and they were like ‘you need to call, please call’,” he added.  (Isn’t that blackmail?)

Trump has often spoken of his long-standing personal relationship with David Pecker, the owner of the National Enquirer.  During the 2016 campaign, Trump several times referred to negative stories in the tabloid aimed at his rivals, such as Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.  After Scarborough’s appearance Friday (June 30th) morning, Trump tweeted:  “Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time.  FAKE NEWS.  He called me to stop a National Enquirer article.  I said no!  Bad show.”  Scarborough quickly responded with his own tweet to deny that he had phoned Trump.  “Yet another lie.  I have texts from your top aides and phone records.  Also, those records show I haven’t spoke with you in many months.”  Scarborough and his co-host and fiance Mika Brzezinski postponed a vacation and appeared on “Morning Joe” on Friday (June 30th) to respond to a series of very personal tweets from Trump on Thursday (June 29th).

Member’s of Trump’s own party are not even defending Trump on this one, for now.  Nobody is afraid of Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski, nor anyone else for that matter, were going to beg or bow down to Trump and kiss his ring or whatever.

On All In with Chris Hayes Republicans may condemn the president’s latest tweets, but Joy Reid and Dan Rather argue they won’t have the courage to disavow him as long as they stand to gain from his presidency.

 

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: The West Virginia Republican Party had to make an awkward explanation for their recent Twitter attack on the state’s formerly Democratic Governor, Jim Justice, when he announced he’s switching his party affiliation.

Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy even said “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post.  Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment.  Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”  Representative Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.  House Speaker Republican Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) even tried to swear the Republicans present at the time to secrecy (well obviously that didn’t work).  When asked about the statement McCarthy lied and denied saying it but when told about the recording then McCarthy just lied more and tried to claim “It was a bad attempt at a joke”.  But Trump is a liar of a different caliber.  Here Lawrence O’Donnell discusses the secret GOP audio.

Trump is also a hypocrite; his “Hire American, Buy American.” executive order is ridiculously hypocritical since Trump and his family hire foreign and buy foreign.  Trump has more than 500 foreign workers working at his various properties.  Trump has had his products made in foreign countries for years.  And Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who also has products made in foreign countries, was granted 3 new trademarks in China, on April 6th 2017, the same day that Trump and Ivanka had dinner with the President of China.  Ivanka even has a cult following in China to the point that they refer to her as Goddess Ivanka and Ivanka’s children even speak Chinese.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: In the middle of the White House’s “Made in America Week,” Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club applied to hire 70 foreign workers for the upcoming fall season.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Joy-Ann Reid shows how Donald Trump is making the bare minimum effort to find American workers for Mar-a-Lago so he can claim that he needs to hire foreign workers to staff his resort.

In the past Trump used to complain about the cost when Mr. Obama traveled or took an occasional vacation trip but Trump is on track to spend more on travel in less than one year what Obama spent on travel in eight years.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow relays a report on Golf.com that Donald Trump explained his frequent visits to a New Jersey golf course by calling the White House “a real dump.”

On All In with Chris Hayes Trump leaves D.C. for a 17-day vacation in Bedminster, where, according to Sports Illustrated, he once called the White House a ‘dump.’

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: President Trump is on what he insists is a working vacation at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, but he found time to play some golf and interact with wedding guests – as a brochure for Bedminster weddings said he would.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2:  President Trump hit a major milestone just over 200 days in to his presidency…his 50th day spent at one of his golf properties.

On All In with Chris Hayes Secret Service can’t afford command post inside Trump Tower.  The Secret Service has vacated its Trump Tower command post over a lease dispute with Trump’s company, the Washington Post reports.

In 2013, during Mr. Obama’s last term in office, Trump tweeted over and over and over again for Mr. Obama to NOT go into Syria, stay out of Syria.  But then Trump started blaming Obama for not going into Syria after the April 4th 2017 chemical attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime on innocent Syrian civilians including women and children.  What?  Mr. Obama did ask Congress for permission to go into Syria at the time, 2013, but Congress wouldn’t even vote on the matter and ignored it.  In addition there was no external support from our allies for going into Syria either.  So if Trump, the hypocrite-in-chief, wants to blame somebody for something from years ago he should either blame the majority Republican Congress that ignored Mr. Obama’s request or our allies.  And Trump is President now; if he was suddenly so worried about the Syrian people then he could have done something before April.  But wait…Syria is supported by Russia; need I say more about why Trump didn’t do anything before April?  This may only have been a distraction from the Russian issue.  And Lawrence O’Donnell of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell has a very interesting theory as to why Trump made any kind of change at all which he calls The Trump-Putin theory on Syria that can’t be ruled out.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell reacts to Donald Trump’s newest lie about fighting terrorism, as well as top Republican senator Bob Corker saying Donald Trump lacks the “stability” and “competence” to be president.

 

On All In with Chris Hayes The little-known local news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group forces its stations to run right-wing commentary – and it’s poised to get even bigger.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at UCLA Center for Global Digital Cultures, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about how Donald Trump’s FCC chairman helped pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcasting find a loophole to purchase a huge number of local TV stations, which it is forcing to air right-wing commentaries.

More than 6 months in Trump is still having rallies even with Boy Scouts.  Boy Scouts are not usually old enough to vote but that didn’t seem to make a difference to Trump though.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump discussed his election victory, the media and the so-called War on Christmas while addressing 30,000 Boy Scouts in West Virginia.  Ashley Parker, Vivian Salama and Eli Stokols weigh in.

On Tuesday (August 1st 2017), Politico got its hands on a previously unpublished transcript of Trump’s July 25 interview with the Wall Street Journal.  In that interview, Trump makes a bold claim about his controversial Boy Scouts speech the day before.  After someone from the Journal suggested that Trump got a “mixed” reaction to his speech, Trump — as he often does — seemed to overcompensate.  “I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful,” Trump said.  “So there was — there was no mix.”  Except a source for the Scouts said this doesn’t appear to have happened at all.  “We are not aware of any call from national BSA leadership to the White House,” the source said.

On All In with Chris Hayes White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to admit the President was lying, even though the Boy Scouts released a statement saying they are unaware of any such call.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Eugene Robinson and Steve Schmidt reflect on Trump’s comments on the Russia investigation and his tone with supporters at a campaign rally in Huntington, West Virginia.

On All In with Chris Hayes Top military brass, Republicans in Congress, members of his own administration, and even the boy scouts are standing up to the president.

 

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump’s speech to members of law enforcement on Long Island centered on the kind of lurid depictions of terrifying violence he often falls back on.  Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin joins Chris Hayes.

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: The Trump Team often passes off disturbing or offensive comments as ‘a joke’ – which is a great tactic when you’d rather not apologize.

On All In with Chris Hayes Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut says he ‘won’t be distracted by [Trump’s] bullying tactics.’

 

He threatened to send troops to Mexico which would mean a war and he’s had a fight with the Prime Minister of Australia which is a long time friend of the US, they’ve been in every war with us helping us fight. 

August 3rd 2017 The Washington Post has obtained transcripts of two conversations President Trump had with foreign leaders: one with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and another with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.  The transcripts were prepared by the White House but have not been released.  The Post is publishing reproductions rather than original documents in order to protect sources.  The reproductions also include minor spelling and grammatical mistakes that appeared in the documents.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Aswin Suebsaeng, politics reporter for The Daily Beast, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the leaking of the transcripts of Donald Trump’s phone calls with president of Mexico and prime minister of Australia.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump campaigned on making Mexico pay for the border wall.  Lawrence O’Donnell explains what the transcript of Trump’s phone call with Mexican President Peña Nieto exposes:  that Trump knew Mexico would never pay for it – it was all political.

Here on All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: In new leaked audio from what was supposed to be an off-the-record dinner, Australian Prime Minister Turnbull roasts the American president.

Here on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Candidate Trump warned the world was laughing at the US.  But now that he’s president, are world leaders laughing at him?  Anne Gearan of The Washington Post joins MSNBC’s Brian Williams

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Buzzfeed’s Alberto Nardelli reports European diplomats say Donald Trump’s “only real position” is doing the opposite of Barack Obama, and that he’s a “laughing stock” who lacks historical perspective.  Nardelli, Christina Greer and Jonathan Alter join Joy Reid.

 

 

 

 

 

  • And now the UK doesn’t trust the US enough to share information with us anymore after leaks of detailed information about the Manchester attack of the Ariana Grande concert investigation to US media by US government officials.  British officials are so angry that they told CNN “We quite frankly can’t afford to risk it anymore,” the Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said.  British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters, “I will be making clear to President Trump today that intelligence that is shared between law enforcement agencies must remain secure.”  The US-UK relationship has been sacrosanct for years, and much of it is based on the trust the two countries have sharing intelligence with one another.  They even form two of the five countries in “Five Eyes,” a small club of English-speaking countries that share almost all of their intel with each other.  But now that trust is compromised and the United States is at fault.  Vital information the US could learn from the Manchester investigation will no longer flow to this side of the pond.  This comes at a time when many of America’s allies are worried Washington just can’t keep a secret, mostly because the President of the United States is giving away sensitive intelligence to autocratic regimes.  Loose lips may sink ships. But, as we’re finding out, it can also sink important friendships too.

May 25th 2017 Trump went to a NATO Summit in Brussels, he used the opportunity to scold and lecture NATO allies, Trump pushed aside a Prime Minister and generally threw his weight around at the NATO Summit.  Even though Trump did all of that Trump did not publicly and explicitly reaffirm that an attack on one NATO ally is an attack on all as every US President has done since President Harry S. Truman.  When Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip Trump surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped and expected he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.  But what was not known is that Trump also disappointed and surprised his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech.  National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode.  They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.  Putin must have been happy. 

For years the United States was the dominant force and set the agenda at the annual gathering of the leaders of the world’s largest economies.  But on July 7th 2017, when Trump met with other leaders at the Group of 20 conference, he found the United States isolated on everything from trade to climate change, and faced with the prospect of the group’s issuing a statement on July 8th 2017 that lays bare how the United States stands alone.  Trump seemed to relish his isolation.  For him, the critical moment of July 7th was his long meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, which seemed to mark the reset in relations that Trump has been desiring for some time.  It also provided Putin the respect and importance he has long demanded as a global partner to Washington.

As reported in the Washington Post Trump had an undisclosed hour-long meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit.  After his much-publicized, two-and a quarter-hour meeting early this month with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany, Trump met informally with the Russian leader for an additional hour later the same day.  The second meeting, unreported at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said.  Halfway through the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin.  Trump was alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter.

The encounter underscores the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin.  During last year’s campaign, Trump spoke admiringly of Putin and at times seemed captivated by him.  Meeting each other face-to-face for the first time in Hamburg, the two presidents seemed to have a chemistry in their more formal bilateral session, evidenced by the fact that it dragged on for more than two hours.  But Trump’s newly-disclosed conversation with Putin at the G-20 dinner is likely to stoke further criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major US adversary.  (Trump probably wanted to thank Putin for getting him elected as president.)

On All In with Chris Hayes Trump held a second informal meeting – with no US government record of it – on the same day that he had already held a more than two-hour official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of The Eurasia Group, talks with Rachel Maddow about the revelation of an undisclosed second encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that left US allies concerned and no official record.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Former State Department officials Michael McFaul and Evelyn Farkas are worried about the unattended and undisclosed conversation between Trump and Putin, and David Frum points out that Putin is a former Russian intelligence agent.

(Now being called the “G19” rather than the “G20” because of the isolation of the United States.)  The “G19” reaffirms its commitment to the Paris Climate Deal without the US.  But elsewhere — including trade and migration, as well as other areas of climate change — the leaders of the world’s biggest economies have compromised around President Trump’s positions.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams With Trump in France plagued by Russia probes & the scandal around his son’s meeting with a Russian attorney, veteran foreign journalist Christopher Dickey assesses how Europe sees Trump.

And did I mention that Trump is a hypocrite too, On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams On his own turf, Trump sounds pretty downtrodden about a lot of foreign nations and leaders.  But when he heads overseas, he seems to change his tune quite a bit.

This man can not represent the United States to the world.  Trump is fighting with our friends, complementing our enemies and cozying up to any dictator he can find such as Russian President Vladimir Putin (of course), Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, even to the point that Trump praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Trump said that he would be ‘honored’ to meet with Kim Jong Un.  And to top it all off Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week at the G20 summit, the White House confirmed June 29th 2017.  Trump must be so excited.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on the recent political shift in Poland that is the context for Donald Trump’s visit, and notes that where previously a meeting with a US president is an earned honor, what Vladimir Putin has done to earn his meeting with Trump is not clear.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Vladimir Putin will likely tell Donald Trump things he wants to hear to manipulate Trump into serving Russia’s interests.

 

Other US politicians, including Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have reacted with consternation. Rubio suggests that partnering with Putin on cybersecurity would be like partnering with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a “Chemical Weapons Unit” (Assad is widely believed to have carried out chemical weapons attacks on his own people). Critics in the United States have unsurprisingly interpreted this proposal as a transparent ploy by Trump to sideline accusations that Russian hackers helped him win the presidential election. However, even if Trump’s proposal is taken at face value, it doesn’t make much sense.

If the proposed cybersecurity unit were to work effectively, the United States would need to share extensive information with Russia on how U.S. officials defend elections against foreign tampering. The problem is, however, that information that is valuable for defending US systems is, almost by definition, information that is valuable for attacking them, too. This is one reason US officials have not previously proposed any far-reaching arrangement with Russia on cybersecurity. Providing such information would almost certainly give the Russians a map of vulnerabilities and insecurities in the system that they could then exploit for their own purposes.  It would not only provide the fox with a map of the henhouse, but give him the security code, the backdoor key, and a wheelbarrow to make off with the carcasses.

US officials have determined that Russian hackers have probed US election systems, presumably to discover vulnerabilities that they could exploit. Although there is no evidence that Russia actually manipulated machines to alter the vote in the 2016 election, there is excellent reason to believe that Russia has carefully considered the pros and cons of direct intervention, as well as the hacking and leaking that it did engage in. Furthermore, when Trump says that this unit would be “impenetrable,” he implies that Russia and the United States would cooperate on making it secure against outside hacking by third parties. Again, such cooperation is wildly unlikely to work well. To make it work, the United States would have to share sensitive methods with Russia, as well as vice versa. Neither side is going to want to do this, because again it would provide potential adversaries with a deep understanding of protective measures, which might allow those adversaries to penetrate them.

In short, the kind of cooperation that Trump is proposing would be very hard to accomplish between close allies with deeply shared security interests (the United States shares a lot of secrets with select allies — but it does not share everything, for the same reasons that they do not share their deepest defensive secrets with the United States). It is more or less impossible to carry off with a state that not only is often an adversary but has recently demonstrated its desire to hack US elections, if only it could get away with it.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle introduces legislation to block funding for Trump’s suggested cybersecurity unit with Russia.  Trump is already backpedaling as another Russia story breaks.  Representative Boyle and Evelyn Farkas join Lawrence O’Donnell to react.

On The Rachel Maddow Show with On Assignment with Richard Engel Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, reports on the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit, and talks with prominent Putin critic, political activist, and chess master Garry Kasparov.

But there are consequences to being friends with dictators.  One of the consequences with Trump being friends with dictators is that since dictators either do not necessarily follow the laws of their own countries or they change or make the laws in their own countries and they are not used to having to follow laws then they do not necessarily follow the laws of the US either.  And in those cases there is not a lot that US law enforcement can do because those people have Diplomatic Immunity, they can kick them out of the country, that’s about it.  For example, when Turkish dictator, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was in Washington DC on May 16th members of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s personal security entourage as well as employees of the Turkish embassy beat down peaceful protesters on American soil.  9 people were injured when Turkish security personnel punched and kicked protesters waving Kurdish flags.  The altercation occurred outside the residence of the Turkish ambassador on the same day that the increasingly-autocratic Turkish President met with Trump.  2 people were ultimately arrested, briefly, and released because they had diplomatic immunity.  After months of violent repression at home, Erdogan appears to have brought his draconian tendencies with him to the United States.  Shockingly, this isn’t the first time Erdogan’s bodyguards have attacked protesters.  At a Brookings Institution event last year featuring Erdogan as a keynote speaker, the Turkish President’s security detail assaulted both protesters and journalists mercilessly.

And another consequence of Trump’s behavior is if Trump keeps fighting with our friends, complementing our enemies and cozying up to any dictator he can find then the US will be in a war but have no friends at all.  Leaders of other countries can not be expected to get insulted and just totally forget about it 5 minutes later and still be friendly with the US after that as though nothing ever happened.  Something like that may not start a war but it would not help if we were in a war.

But Moscow condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian maned warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates.  And Russians also said they had suspended their use of a hotline that the American and Russian militaries used to avoid collisions of their aircraft in Syrian airspace.

 

And on August 7th 2017 as reported in The New York Times:  Stung by onerous new sanctions from the United Nations Security Council, nuclear-armed North Korea on Monday (August 7th 2017) threatened retaliation, saying the United States would pay dearly “thousands of times.”  In its first major response to the sanctions drafted by the United States and adopted on Saturday (August 5th 2017), North Korea said it would never relinquish its missile and nuclear arsenals and called the penalties a panicky American-led response to its growing military might.

The North Korean response, in statements from its official news agency, foreign minister and United Nations mission, suggested that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was doubling down on his goal of developing a nuclear-armed missile that could hit the continental United States.  The warnings began with a statement from North Korea’s official news agency, threatening to make the United States “pay the price for its crime thousands of times,” referring to the new sanctions.  “There is no bigger mistake than the United States believing that its land is safe across the ocean,” the news agency said.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Courtney Kube, NBC News national security producer, talks with Rachel Maddow about the latest developments in North Korea’s military capabilities, a missile with intercontinental range.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump’s failure to lead as North Korea launches its most successful missile test yet is causing alarm among leaders in the US and around the world.  What can Trump do to alleviate the situation?  Nicholas Kristof and John McLaughlin join Lawrence O’Donnell.

August 8th 2017 as reported in The New York Times:  Trump threatened on Tuesday (August 8th 2017) to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States as tensions with the isolated nuclear-armed state grow into perhaps the most serious foreign policy challenge yet in his young administration.  “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.  “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.  He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

The president’s comments came as North Korea earlier in the day escalated its criticism of the United States, as well as its neighboring allies, by warning that it will mobilize all its resources to take “physical action” in retaliation against the latest round of United Nations sanctions.

The statement, carried by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, was the strongest indication yet that the country could conduct another nuclear or missile test, as it had often done in response to past United Nations sanctions.  Until now, the North’s response to the latest sanctions had been limited to strident yet vague warnings, such as threatening retaliation “thousands of times over.”  “Packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation,” the North Korean statement said.  “They should be mindful that the D.P.R.K.’s strategic steps accompanied by physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”  D.P.R.K. stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  North Korea’s statement on Tuesday (August 8th 2017) appeared to defy efforts by both Washington and Beijing to defuse the tense situation.

August 8th 2017 North Korea said it is “carefully examining” plans to attack Guam with medium- to long-range ballistic missiles, state-run media reported.  The rogue nation’s statement follows Donald Trump’s comments hours before, during which he warned North Korea that any threats to the U.S. “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.  The North Korean army made the announcement in a statement distributed by its state-run news agency that the military is reviewing a plan to create an “enveloping fire” in areas around the U.S. territory, located in the Pacific Ocean about 2,100 miles from North Korea.

The statement said the decision to review such plans is in response to a recent ICBM test.  There are 7,000 US military personnel on Guam.  The main base on the island is Andersen Air Force Base that is home to long-range B-1 bombers that have recently been used for “show of force” missions to South Korea following North Korea’s two ICBM missile launches.  Andersen Air Force Base is just one of the installations on Guam; Naval Base Guam also has a significant number of personnel.

Guam’s offices of Guam Homeland Security and Civil Defense said in a statement that its threat level remained unchanged, and that it will “continue to monitor the recent events surrounding North Korea and their threatening actions.”

If this keeps up, threatening statements back and forth between Trump and North Korea, we will end up in a war with North Korea, possibly even a nuclear war.

On All In with Chris Hayes Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts responds to Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ remarks about North Korea.

On All In with Chris Hayes ‘We need to curb this president, who seems to think he’s negotiating the Taj Mahal or some other casino with Steve Wynn,’ says Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson about Trump’s actions with regard to North Korea.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reviews what is known about North Korean military capability and its history of overblown threats and notes that the Donald Trump administration’s inconsistency on policy and equally overblown threats are the new, frightening variable in …

On The Rachel Maddow Show Joe Cirincione, president of The Ploughshares Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump is taking the exact wrong approach to North Korea with his empty threats and bellicosity.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Courtney Kube, NBC News national security and military reporter, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether Donald Trump is seriously considering privatizing the war in Afghanistan, and whether Trump’s bluster on North Korea has any basis in strategy.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell looks at what Trump was doing as news broke that North Korea has “successfully produced a miniature nuclear warhead” and the potential consequences of Trump’s later reaction, threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Former NSC staff member Robert Litwak details the consequences of a military strike on North Korea to Lawrence O’Donnell, while Trump biographer David Cay Johnston says the military must refuse any unlawful orders from Trump.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams After Donald Trump threatened North Korea with ‘fire and fury,’ Pyongyang threatened to attack the U.S. territory Guam.  Andrea Mitchell, General Barry McCaffrey, and Malcolm Nance discuss.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Reacting to Trump’s threat of ‘fire and fury’ to North Korea, former Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD) says the generals have to ‘get the president under control.’

On All In with Chris Hayes Trump wasn’t delivering a carefully vetted statement crafted by top national security aides when he said North Korea ‘will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.’

On The Rachel Maddow Show Andrea Mitchell, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether US intelligence agencies are yet unified on their assessment of North Korea’s military capability.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams After Donald Trump promised ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea, the secretive state responded directly saying ‘sound dialogue is not possible’ with the US president.  Our expert panel reacts.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow explains why this week’s frantic bellicosity from Donald Trump toward North Korea does not seem to have had a distinct trigger.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shows the contrasting messaging from different members of the Trump team in how they’re speaking about the potential threat from North Korea.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Sue Mi Terry, former NSC senior analyst on North Korea, talks with Rachel Maddow about the intelligence on North Korea’s military capability and why it is dangerous that the Trump administration is not able to deliver a clear policy message on North Korea.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Taking questions on camera from reporters twice in one day, Trump talked North Korea, Russia, and so much more.  Our expert reporter panel reacts to the deluge of headlines.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump took his threats against North Korea to new rhetorical heights speaking to reporters on Thursday, but one critic says his rhetoric is just ’empty and dangerous.’

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Noting ‘it’s hard to sleep well at night,’ conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes says Trump facing off with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is basically two erratic narcissists playing chicken.

On All In with Chris Hayes The president is dangerously inflaming tensions with North Korea, according to Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas, who called on Congress to step in and exercise more control over nuclear decision-making.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, talks with Rachel Maddow about the pace of North Korea’s nuclear development and the lack of anything especially new this week in that development to justify Donald Trump’s burst of blustery brinkmans…

Some how Trump has now gone from threatening North Korea to threatening Venezuela, what?  How did Venezuela get in the middle of this?

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares video of Donald Trump raising unbidden the prospect of a U.S. “military option” for addressing the crisis in Venezuela.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Trump ended the week with new threats against North Korea and now, Venezuela.  Jonathan Alter, Ned Price, and Betsy Woodruff join Joy Reid to discuss.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams On Friday (August 11th 2017) Trump again took reporters’ questions and again warned North Korea in an escalating war of words.  He also wouldn’t rule out a ‘military option’ for the crisis in Venezuela.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump reached out to the governor of Guam after again ratcheting up the rhetoric on North Korea.  Retired Colonel Jack Jacobs and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) who was once stationed on Guam discuss.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) says that Trump should try to seek a ‘diplomatic solution’ for the crisis in North Korea.

 

  • Or even war with Syria and Syria’s ally, Russia (Putin didn’t get his money’s worth), since the White House appeared to threaten military action against Syria.  Only by some miracle would we not end up in a war with somebody.  And fighting with our friends would make it very easy for any enemies to attack us because after our former friends say ‘F you’ then we’ll have no help and we’ll be like a sitting duck in the water and fighting alone.

 

  • Trump and his people are incompetent; they literally didn’t even know how to turn the lights on in the White House.  A member of his own party said that he was almost criminally incompetent.  Trump has already gotten at least 1 person in the military killed and several wounded in a raid in Yemen, because “almost everything went wrong” that’s how incompetent he is.  And 10 different officials said that they didn’t even get anything out of the mission, nothing of value or that is useful.  They got a dead Navy Seal out of it and not much else, but Trumps people kept lying and saying that this disaster of a mission was a success and that we got all this stuff out of the mission.  He didn’t even care enough to think that we need to do this the right way so nobody gets killed; he decided to do the mission while he was busy shoving food in his mouth.  Then he just lied about it after the Navy Seal was killed, it was Obama’s fault, no it wasn’t.  Then after enough people said that Obama had nothing to do with it then he started blaming the military generals.  It’s everybody’s fault but Trump’s.  The dead Navy Seal’s father wouldn’t even talk to Trump, he said up until then we were doing drone attacks why all of a sudden did we need to do some big grand gesture like a raid.

Trump and his people are so incompetent that the question has been asked is our current administration stupid or nefarious; part of the problem with Trump is that his administration could be both stupid and nefarious at the same time.  And then there is the issue of Trump and several of his people saying that a ship, an aircraft carrier, was being sent to North Korea but the ship went in the opposite direction.  Stupid or nefarious?

The USS Fitzgerald collided with the Philippine-flagged container ship ACX Crystal off the coast of Yokosuka, Japan, June 17th 2017 before 2:20 a.m. local time, according to the US Navy.  The Fitzgerald sustained damage on its starboard side and experienced flooding in some spaces as a result of the collision, according to the Navy.  The destroyer was operating about 56 nautical miles southwest of Yokosuka when it collided with the ACX Crystal.  Most of the Fitzgerald’s 300 crew members on board would have been asleep at the time, The Associated Press reported.  Weather conditions were clear at the time of the collision, the AP reported.  The area is often busy with sea traffic, with as many as 400 ships passing through it every day, according to Japan’s coast guard.  7 sailors were killed.  Initially after the collision, five sailors aboard the USS Fitzgerald were reported injured, and seven sailors were reported missing.  The remains of the missing sailors were later found in flooded berthing compartments.

August 21st 2017 as reported in The New York Times:  United States Navy ships worldwide will suspend operations for a day or two this week to examine basic seamanship and teamwork after the second collision of a Navy destroyer and a commercial ship in two months, the top naval officer said Monday (August 21st 2017).

The officer, Admiral John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said he had ordered two major actions after the collision between the destroyer John S. McCain and an oil tanker early Monday off the coast of Singapore that left 10 sailors missing and five injured.

First, Admiral Richardson said he had ordered an “operational pause” for Navy fleet commanders to review within the week teamwork, safety, seamanship and other “fundamentals.” During that time, commanders will suspend ship operations for a day or two.  Second, the admiral said he had ordered a broader, monthslong review to examine the specific situation in the western Pacific, where the Navy has suffered four major ship accidents since February.  “That gives great cause for concern that there’s something out there that we’re not getting at,” Admiral Richardson told reporters at the Pentagon.

Off the Singapore coast, search teams scrambled on Monday to determine the fate of the missing sailors from the John S. McCain, a guided-missile destroyer that had been passing east of the Strait of Malacca en route to a port visit in Singapore.

At 5:24 a.m. local time, before dawn broke, the destroyer collided with the Alnic MC, a 600-foot vessel that transports oil and chemicals, the Navy said.  The destroyer was damaged near the rear on its port, or left-hand, side.  Ten sailors on the ship remained unaccounted for.  Five others were injured, none with life-threatening conditions, a Navy official said.  Ships with the Singaporean and Malaysian navies and helicopters from the assault ship America were rushing to search for survivors.

Families of the ship’s crew members waited through the night in the United States, hoping for news of their loved ones.  “No word yet but some sailors have called on cell to families,” wrote Marla Meriano, the mother of Meghan Meriano, a 24-year-old electrical officer, in a Facebook post.  “Thank you for all the prayers and remarks,” she wrote two hours later.  “God has his plan and we serve him.”

Obviously Trump has a problem with the military especially with the Navy, there have been several incidents with the Navy since Trump has been in office that have never happened before.  I am not saying that these specific ship collisions are Trump’s fault since Trump was not on board the ships to screw anything up but something is going on with the Navy.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Courtney Kube, NBC News national security and military reporter, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about Donald Trump’s frustration at the inability of the US to exploit Afghanistan’s mineral resources, and his criticism of his military advisers.

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell An NBC News exclusive report shows a president angry about the direction of the war in Afghanistan and describes a tense meeting in which Donald Trump compared the conflict to an NYC restaurant renovation.  David Cay Johnston and Tim O’Brien join Lawrence O’Donnell.

 

Trump actually said that he thought being President would be easier (of course he did because he’s ignorant).  While a business may very well be a type of dictatorship because the owner of that business can dictate exactly what happens with that business the US government is not supposed to be a dictatorship.  The President does not own the US government; as a matter of fact our government was specifically designed by the Founding Fathers to not be a dictatorship, autocracy, kingdom or business-like because they had enough of that.  It is a democracy and we, the American people, own the US government; we, the American people, are the bosses, the shareholders and the customers, the President works for us and a business does not work that way.

Although it is not the same type of situation but just as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Bill Shine eventually learned the hard way, by being fired from Fox News, that they can not just do whatever they want to women, so too will Trump eventually learn, whether he wants to or not, that he can not just do whatever he wants to the American people.  By the way, Roger Ailes, former CEO of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, who left Fox amid sexual harassment allegations last year, died at age 77 May 18th 2017.

And Trump is so ignorant that rather than learning the history of China and North Korea on his own or asking any of the Americans working around him in the government before having a meeting with the President of China he had to learn China North Korea history from the President of China, Trump actually said “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”

 

 

  • And even his people that do know something can’t tell him anything so they are leaking stuff to the media because he listens to cable news so much that they’re getting their messages through to him that way so the place is leaking like a sieve.

Trump said that “the leaks are real but the news is fake”, that doesn’t even make any sense.  Leaks like that tend to happen when the people working there find what’s wrong and they know that it won’t do any good to talk to their boss about it so they leak to the media because ultimately the real bosses are we, the American People.  The same things happened when Nixon was in office.  Nixon even came up with something he called “the plumbers unit” to try and find and stop the leaks.  Trump does not have a plumbers unit but he is trying to stop the leaks, he can not stop the leaks.  Nixon could not stop the leaks and neither can Trump.

August 4th 2017 as reported in The New York Times:  Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Friday that the Justice Department is pursuing about three times as many leak investigations as were open at the end of the Obama era, a significant devotion of resources to hunt down disclosures that have plagued the Trump administration.

Mr. Sessions vowed that the Justice Department would not hesitate to bring criminal charges against people who had leaked classified information.  He also announced that the F.B.I. had created a new counterintelligence unit to specialize in such cases.  “I strongly agree with the president and condemn in the strongest terms the staggering number of leaks undermining the ability of our government to protect this country,” he said.  The announcement by Mr. Sessions comes 10 days after President Trump publicly accused his attorney general of being “very weak” on pursuing these investigations.

Mr. Sessions also said he had opened a review of Justice Department rules governing when investigators may issue subpoenas related to the news media and leak investigations.  “We respect the important role that the press plays and will give them respect, but it is not unlimited,” he said.  “They cannot place lives at risk with impunity.”

The news conference came against the backdrop of repeated pressure by Mr. Trump, in public and in private, for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to search harder for people inside the government who have been telling reporters what was happening behind closed doors.

The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have brought to light information ranging from White House infighting and the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders to what surveillance showed about contacts by Mr. Trump’s associates with Russia — and even what Mr. Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office about his firing of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

Not all leaks are illegal, and many of the disclosures about palace intrigue at the White House that have irritated Mr. Trump violated no law.  However, the Espionage Act and several other federal laws do criminalize unauthorized disclosures about certain national security information, like surveillance secrets.  Officials declined to discuss which specific leaks are under investigation or who the suspects may be.

Several advocacy groups for reporters and First Amendment issues sharply criticized the statements made during the news conference, as did Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post.  “Sessions talked about putting lives at risk,” Mr. Baron said.  “We haven’t done that.  What we’ve done is reveal the truth about what administration officials have said and done.  In many instances, our factual stories have contradicted false statements they’ve made.”

Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, said: “There’s a distinction between revelations that make the government uncomfortable and revelations that put lives at risk.  We have not published information that endangers lives.”  The Post and The Times declined to comment about whether the government had contacted them regarding leak investigations.

In a move derided by critics as an attack on the free press, Sessions said the administration was reviewing policies on forcing journalists to reveal their sources.  It is, however, difficult to prosecute members of the news media in the United States for publishing leaked information.  “One of the things we are doing is reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas,” Sessions told reporters as he announced administration efforts to battle what he called a “staggering number of leaks undermining the ability of our government to protect this country.”

A media subpoena is a writ compelling a journalist to testify or produce evidence, with a penalty for failure to do so.  The fact that the administration is reviewing its policy leaves open the possibility of sentencing journalists for not disclosing their sources.  “Every American should be concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to step up its efforts against whistleblowers and journalists,” said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.  “A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters the department was just starting to review the policy on media subpoenas and could not say yet how it might be changed.  But he did not rule out the possibility of threatening journalists with jail time.

When a president starts putting the media in jail, especially en masse, that is step 1 to formally and officially being under the rule of a fascist dictator.  Trump is a fascist dictator, also known as autocracy.  And that is the beginning of the end of the free press and of democracy.  See Trump’s Fascism Page.

Historically, government employees or contractors who give sensitive information to the media are much more likely to be prosecuted than the reporters who receive it.  U.S. regulations give journalists special protections, barring them from law enforcement that might “reasonably impair newsgathering activities.”

Federal prosecutors must get special permission from the U.S. attorney general before issuing a subpoena to try to force a member of the news media to divulge information to authorities.  New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed in 2005 for refusing to reveal a source about stories on Iraq, but she cut a deal with prosecutors before she was formally charged.  In addressing the wider issue of leaks, Sessions said the Justice Department has tripled the number of investigations into unauthorized leaks of classified information and that four people have already been charged.

It is not illegal to leak information, as such, but divulging classified information is against the law.  Some of the more high-profile leaks in the Trump administration have revealed White House infighting in articles that would appear not to involve divulging classified information.  Sessions did not immediately give the identities of the four people charged, but said they had been accused of unlawfully disclosing classified information or concealing contacts with foreign intelligence officers.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Charlie Savage and Carrie Cordero talk about the Justice Department’s plan, how it could backfire and Trump’s use of the word “leak.”

 

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Trump’s 200th day in office marked with more bad poll numbers.  With the president beginning a ‘working vacation,’ his 200th day in office sees poll numbers showing most Americans disapprove of the job he’s done so far and don’t believe the White House.

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Greatest hits from Trump’s second 100 days in office.  It’s now been 200 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as President.  Here’s a look back at the second 100 days of his headline-generating time in office.

 

 

Trump The Crooked Page

  • Would you consider someone who creates a fake university, one that takes peoples money and they don’t learn anything from the fake university a crook?

 

  • Would you consider some who writes big checks to pay prosecutors that are considering suing them a crook?

 

  • Would you consider someone who creates a fake charity that takes in money but uses it for their own purposes, like buying paintings of themselves or paying off personal court debts, a crook?

 

  • Would you consider someone who is sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act (basically a corrupt illegal business)  with links to Russian organized crime (Russian Mafia) and money laundering a crook?

 

  • Would you consider someone who is sued for fraud a crook?

 

  • Would you consider someone who assaults women by grabbing their crotches against their will a crook?

 

  • Would you consider someone who, on a regular basis, gets people to do work for them but either does not pay them what they are supposed to or does not pay them at all a crook?

If so then Trump is a crook to you too, those are just a few of the crooked things Trump has done.  Trump settled the fake university lawsuit for $25 million just before the inauguration; seems like fraud to me.  However, before Trump settled the fake university lawsuit there were prosecutors, such as Pam Bondi, Florida’s Attorney General, who were considering whether to bring a lawsuit against Trump’s fake university until Trump paid them with big checks then the decision was made to not bring a lawsuit against Trump’s fake university; seems like bribery to me.

The investigators are still investigating the fake charity scam.  And on June 6th 2017 Forbes reported yet another charity scam, Trump has been ripping off the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through the Trump National Golf Club with annual golf events.  The charity actually ran well at first when Trump’s son, Eric Trump, ran things but then Donald Trump got involved and started funneling money into his own business, that’s Self Dealing.  Here, on All In with Chris Hayes, Chris Hayes talks about how Trump skimmed money meant for sick kids.  Eric Trump said he was raising money for cancer research at a golf course donated by his dad.  But it turns out Donald Trump was charging.

In the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act lawsuit the judge struck down evidence that implicated Trump in the SOHO New York racketeering conspiracy.  On June 17th 2016, Ex-finance director Jody Kriss responded to a dismissal motion targeting his third amended complaint, saying in his motion that Bayrock leaders had planned and structured businesses from conception as criminal enterprises intended to defraud investors.  Kriss also accused lawyers for Bayrock co-owner Felix Satter of trying to “gravely mislead” the court into looking at the underlying issues as a typical business dispute inappropriate for a RICO action.

The case, initially filed in 2010, claims Satter and another co-owner, Tevfik Arif, collaborated with Trump on hotel projects starting in 2002 while concealing that Satter had been convicted of a felony related to organized crime and was allegedly skimming money.  In February 2017, Judge Schofield struck down a court order preventing the dissemination of emails connected to the case that allegedly implicated a number of law firms, including Nixon Peabody LLP and Roberts & Holland LLP, along with Trump SoHo New York, in the racketeering conspiracy.

However, To expand his real estate developments over the years, Donald Trump, his company and partners repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics — several allegedly connected to organized crime, according to a USA TODAY review of court cases, government and legal documents and an interview with a former federal prosecutor.  The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.

Dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many of those super-wealthy people are generally suspected of corrupt practices as a result of interconnected relationships among Russia’s business elite, government security services and criminal gangs, according to former US prosecutor Ken McCallion, as well as Steven Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations.  “Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview.  “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”

In addition to the RICO Act lawsuit brought by Trump’s ex-partners against Trump there was also a fraud lawsuit brought by buyers of Trump SOHO against Trump.  Donald Trump and the promoters of his Trump SoHo hotel-condominium were sued by buyers who accused them of fraudulently touting out-sized sales figures to encourage them to buy units and inflate the project’s financial health.  The lawsuit by 15 plaintiffs was filed late Monday (August 2nd 2010) in Manhattan federal court, less than four months after the 46-story building opened and three months after the offering plan went effective, allowing closings to begin.  Trump SoHo is a venture between the Trump Organization, which manages the building, and Bayrock Group LLC and Sapir Organization LLC, which formed its sponsor Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC.  The smallest units start at $1.2 million.

The complaint said the defendants in sales pitches and to the media during the first 18 months of marketing advertised that the building was “30, 40, 50, 60 percent or more sold.”  Instead, when the offering plan went effective, buyers learned that just 62 of the 391 units, or 16 percent, had been sold, the complaint said.  A minimum of 15 percent was needed for the plan to go effective.  Many banks will not lend to buyers of condominium units when sponsors still own a large percentage of the units, often 50 percent.  Lawyers believe there can be greater risks when that happens because of the sponsors’ obligations to their own lenders and to the condominium itself.

“Not only were the plaintiffs individually misled into signing their contracts,” lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey wrote, “the defendants’ collective efforts to pump up sales through false and misleading statements caused all buyers to miss an option to revoke their contract that they all should have had in the absence of fraud.”  The complaint seeks to rescind purchase contracts, a refund of $1.75 million of deposits and punitive damages.

For Donald J. Trump, it is a long-held legal strategy, if not a point of pride, to avoid knuckling under to plaintiffs in court.  “I don’t settle lawsuits — very rare — because once you settle lawsuits, everybody sues you,” he said recently.  But Trump made an exception when buyers of units in Trump SoHo, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan, asserted that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project.  He and his co-defendants settled the case in November 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3.16 million in deposits, while admitting no wrongdoing.

The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how Trump did business.  Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan.  And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it.  The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so.

And Trump got sued again for his latest non payment of people that did work for him.  And, among other issues, not paying people for their work is coming back at Trump, he is having a hard time getting top attorneys to represent him in the Russia mess he’s made.  Top lawyers with at least four major law firms rebuffed White House overtures to represent Trump in the Russia investigations.  “The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the firms themselves.  Here Rachel Maddow reviews Donald Trump’s history of not paying his debts and notes how that is a contributing factor as he is reportedly facing rejection from outside law firms as he seeks to bolster his defense in the face of mounting scandals.

On June 12th 2017 The Washington Post reported that attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland sued President Trump, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.  The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government entities, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president.  Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests.  But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests.  For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.  The lawsuit, a signed copy of which Racine and Frosh provided to The Washington Post on Sunday night, alleges “unprecedented constitutional violations” by Trump.  The suit says Trump’s continued ownership of a global business empire has rendered the president “deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors” and has undermined the integrity of the US political system.  Read the lawsuit here.

Trump made a settlement in one court case but did not even bother to do what he said he was going to do.  He was bragging about grabbing women and it was recorded then he lied and said it was just locker room talk and that pissed the women off so then I don’t know how many came forward to tell what he had done to them.  One of Trump’s Republican supporters would even have been okay if Trump had used the word rape, On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: Republican Congressman Blake Farenthold complained about ‘some female senators from the Northeast’ who are against the GOP health care bill, and said he might challenge one of them to a duel ‘if it was a guy from south Texas.’  Trump has been in more than 4,000 court cases before becoming president, now that’s a crook.  Not only is that a crook, that’s at least as much if not more of a crook than Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon ever was.  If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck, looks like a duck and smells like a duck then I’m sorry but it’s a damn duck.

Quite frankly I honestly do not know why Trump was not in jail before he even started running for office.  But on the August 4th 2017 episode of All In with Chris Hayes in the Red Line segment (unfortunately MSNBC did not put the video clip of the segment online) in an interview with David Cay Johnston,  Chris Hayes asks “he never has had any criminal convictions, never been indicted over any sort of financial irregularities and there`s something to be said for living your life in a spotlight that long and not bringing down the law upon you, right?”  And David Cay Johnston answers that he once had the Mob’s #2 hit man, Harry, in his house “telling me about the people he killed which the FBI and local cops backed up his stories.  And Harry was very proud of the fact that he had never been
arrested for his crimes.  Many people who cheat and who swindle and steal as
Donald has done, never get arrested.  That`s not a measure of anything.”  The full question and answer are below, as well the full interview, and I linked them to the full transcript of the show in case you would like to read the full show.

CHRIS HAYES, ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES:  Joining me now, Pulitzer Prize Winning Reporter, David Cay Johnston, Founder of DCReport, author of The Making of Donald Trump, someone who spent a lot of time reporting on Donald Trump and his finances in particular.  So my question to you is, do you think he has reason to fear Mueller on that score?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, DCREPORT FOUNDER:  Oh, I think he has tremendous reason to fear Mueller on that score.  Remember that Donald`s principal bank is Deutsch Bank.  Deutsch Bank has already been fined over $600 million for laundering money for Russian oligarchs.  There`s a lawsuit in New York alleging that non authorized a quarter billion dollar tax fraud in which the profit from Trump`s SoHo and Donald owned 18 percent of the profits, ended up in an Icelandic Bank under the thumb of a Russian oligarch.  He`s got a lot to worry about.

HAYES:  Let me ask you this, this is someone who has been in public life for many years and he`s been the subject of a lot of attention and he has run into problems with civil suits, he`s been fined but he never has had any criminal convictions, never been indicted over any sort of financial irregularities and there`s something to be said for living your life in a spotlight that long and not bringing down the law upon you, right?

JOHNSTON: Well, yes.  You know, I once had the Harry (INAUDIBLE) as the Mob`s number to a hit man in the western U.S. in my home and telling me about the people he killed which the FBI and local cops backed up his stories.  And Harry was very proud of the fact that he had never been arrested for his crimes.  Many people who cheat and he swindle and steal as Donald has done, never get arrested.  That`s not a measure of anything.

HAYES:  What do you think about the idea of kind of trip wires as they go along?  I mean, seems to me that it is going to be the case, they`re going to start to look at the finances and start pulling on threads.  And they`re very complex finances, whether their all above board or not, that seems to be one thing that is absolutely established.  They`re very complex, right?

JOHNSTON:  Yes.  But the things that they`re going to be able to show are transfers of money.  FinCEN, the organization that does this is mostly IRS people who does this, they are very good at finding a financial needle in the global hay stack of funds that are floating around.  And once they uncover a few keys and get some people to cooperate, if there, in fact, were illicit flows of money and money laundering and what amounted to payoffs, they will find those things and remember they`re going to start with people on the outer edge, interview them in front of a Grand Jury, perhaps threaten some them with prosecution if they need to and leverage them as they move towards the center.  And Donald is very worried that finally, he has an investigation he can`t compromise or run out the clock on, as he has done with numerous previous investigations of himself.

HAYES:  That strikes me as important.  You`ve reported on way other times that he`s had investigations looming over him and the steps he`s taken to essentially make sure they didn`t get to him.  And it does appear, do you feel like we`re watching history repeat itself?

JOHNSTON:  Here, I don`t think he`s going to be able to do what he`s done in the past which is either run out the clock, compromise the investigation, go and rat out other people.  In this case, he`s got a team of incredible people going after him.  And those 16 lawyers that have gone to work for Bob Mueller, they didn`t leave their million-dollar jobs at big law firms for a two-week job or for a lark.  They were persuaded obviously by Mueller.  This is important historic work and you need to be on the team.

HAYES:  All right, David Cay Johnston, thanks for your time.

JOHNSTON: Thank you.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the few times authorities have looked at Donald Trump’s financial bookkeeping and why that explains Trump’s apparently anxiety over the possibility that Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation will include Trump’s finances.

On The Rachel Maddow Show David Cay Johnston, investigative journalist and founder of DCReport.org, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s legal exposure through his financial records and why Trump’s legal representation isn’t what one would expect.

And there are even more crimes on Trump’s Follow The Money Page and Trump’s Russian Connections Page.

And now that he’s the President his administration is being sued left and right, and travel bans and his many conflicts of interests are just a couple of the problems among many.  And Trump kept talking about taking the oil in the Middle East, which is a war crime, so high ranking officials have had to clean up behind Trump.  The Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, had to go to those countries and tell them that we are not going to take their oil to try to keep the troops that we have there from being killed.  We should have never been in Iraq in the 1st place but I digress.  The Middle East is a quagmire; it’s like quicksand, once you get in it’s hard as hell to get out.  They have been fighting each other for centuries but haven’t solved anything yet so we have been there for years and we are going to be there for years more.  And Nostradamus predicted a 33 year war; if he was correct the Middle East may be it.  So it would be helpful if during the time we spend in the Middle East the President of the United States is not sabotaging our military and getting them killed over nonsense and war crimes.

 

And on May 31st 2017 Trump released details of 14 ethics waivers.  Trump has granted more ethics waivers in 4 months than Obama did in 8 years.  10 of the 14 waivers publicly disclosed by the White House are undated and unsigned, raising questions about when they were put in place.  The Office of Government Ethics plans to press the White House to clarify when it issued a slew of ethics waivers giving its staffers permission to interact with their former employers or clients, an indication that the exemptions might not have been properly granted.  Particularly troubling, ethics experts said, was a blanket waiver allowing White House appointees to communicate with media organizations where they previously worked that was described as “retroactive”, a maneuver that the ethics office said was not permitted.  “There’s no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” said Walter M. Shaub Jr., director of the ethics office.  The exemption appeared aimed at clearing interactions that chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon may have had with Breitbart News, the conservative news site he previously ran.  Under an ethics pledge mandated by Trump, Bannon was barred for two years from participating in matters directly related to Breitbart or his other former employers or clients.  “Issuing a waiver after the fact won’t fix the problem,” he said.  So here is the thing, if you need a retroactive ethics waiver then you have already done something wrong and violated a rule.  Trump is not draining any swamp, Trump has done nothing more than add bigger gators to the swamp and made the swamp bigger.  So for all you “drain the swamp” people out there, you can forget that.

 

 

Trump Page

If you were/are a Donald Trump voter/supporter also known as the right, conservative and/or Republican then, unfortunately, you have been lied to by the carnival barker, conned by the con artist-in-chief with his many scandals.    Although it’s supposedly a myth but P. T. Barnum has been attributed with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute” and if it wasn’t so mean I would call you Trump voters/supporters “suckers” but I know that some of you are feeling burned by Trump and if you feel that way then for that I am empathetic and sympathetic.  You were desperately seeking something, a positive change, but Trump did not turn out to be that positive change that you were seeking and now it’s an unending nightmare.  I feel your pain.  Here is Bill Maher’s New RuleIf you are as ready as I am for Trump to get fired then here are a couple of possibilities.  Or if you are just simply wondering How Can We Get Rid of Trump then here is The New York Times idea of that.  

If that is not how you feel and you still approve of Trump then you will find no empathy or sympathy here.  America has always been great but if “Make America Great Again” means to regress America back to the 1930s, 40s, 50s or 60s, well then, congratulations, we are on our way thanks to Trump.  But Trump will not change or become Presidential.  Although you may not agree with some of the left, liberal, progressive and/or Democratic ideas you too would benefit from political information about your President.  Becoming well informed may combat making the same mistake again.  Or I have a bridge and some swamp land I could sell you.

Here on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman joins Lawrence O’Donnell exclusively to explain what he learned about Trump from facing off against him in the Trump University case.  He also weighs in on the potential of a SCOTUS decision on Trump’s travel ban.

On All In with Chris Hayes Representative Leonard Lance (R-NJ) concedes that he can’t definitively tell his constituents that the president and his aides did not engage in a conspiracy with hostile foreign government agents.

On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reviews the development of the Trump Russia investigation over past seven months, one breaking news story after another.  (Watch the dates!)

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell How is the Constitution holding up in the era of Trump?  Lawrence O’Donnell discusses with Joy Reid and Joan Walsh.

 

Donald Trump has watched his ratings decline for months, but on Wednesday (August 2nd 2017) two respected polls showed that only a third of American voters view him favorably — a new low less than 200 days into his presidency.  A new Quinnipiac University Poll has the president’s approval rating falling to 33 percent, while Gallup shows it at 36 percent.  Quinnipiac’s measurement is the lowest in the poll’s tracking of the Trump administration thus far, and Gallup’s is the lowest three-day average it has registered.  While Gallup tracks voter opinions daily, Quinnipiac’s latest survey delves deeper into beliefs about the president, showing him hitting new lows across the board.

Of the voters surveyed by Quinnipiac, 61 percent disapproved of Trump’s job performance, with over 60 percent also saying he “is not honest,” “does not have good leadership skills” and “does not share their values.”

As low as Trump’s approval rating is I do not understand the people who still approve of Trump, what exactly are they approving of?  Trump has not done anything helpful or useful for anybody anywhere, not even his own party or his-self.  Trump has sabotaged his own party’s agenda, his own family and his own self; perhaps not on purpose but still he has done it maybe because he just could not help himself.  So still the question remains, what exactly are the people who approve of Trump approving of?

On All In with Chris Hayes Donald Trump often spoke on the campaign trail about how easy governing would be.  These days, his tune is changing.

 

 

 

On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams The rhetorical battle between the two most powerful Republicans in Washington as escalated with one FOX News host calling on Senator McConnell to retire.  Sam Stein and Kelsey Snell discuss.

On All In with Chris Hayes The president is lashing out at Mitch McConnell and distancing himself from Senate Republicans because legislators could end the year with no big wins, says Jim Manley, former chief spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

 

On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: In the race for Alabama Senate, one candidate has said ‘God put Donald Trump in the White House,’ while two others have released fawning ads with titles like ‘Support Trump’ and ‘Trump Man.’

 

And Star Jones also talked to Wendy on the Wendy Williams Show about the photo saying that Kathy was “Out of bounds, 100%, the 1st rule of comedy is the joke must be funny, that’s not funny.  No matter how I feel about him, his policies and him as a man you don’t ever want to see the president of the United States beheaded, that’s not a joke.  Especially since we’ve had assassinations in our country, we don’t want that.  She crossed the line, she knows, she apologized but by the same token, Wendy, do you know how many things he has said that has crossed the line?  Being nasty to a disabled journalist, going after a Gold Star family, the kind of things that he said about Megyn Kelly and other women.  The actual words that came out of his mouth that were on audio tape where he said that you can assault a woman and she’ll let you when you’re a celebrity.  Those are not fake news, Ms. Jones did not make any of that up, there’s video and audio tape evidence.  So if there’s anything to be upset about it should be him and what he has brought into this country.  His attitude has emboldened racist, it has made racism come from underneath it’s hood and it lays at the feet of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, that’s on him.”

 

 

Something has been stolen…

Trump is an illegitimate President; Trump and the Russians basically stole the Presidency, the executive branch of our government; we only have 3 branches, Executive (which is the President), Legislative (which are the Congress and the Senate) and Judicial (which are the courts), to our government and they took a whole one.  The whole Russian situation is basically a bloodless (since no one has a bullet in their head yet) political coup, that’s what this is.

The Electoral College was supposed to stop something like that from happening but that system failed and it was not the first time either.  In the 2000 election Bush was put into office by way of the Electoral College against the will of the voters.  Although Mr. Bush did not have help from the Russians he was not who the voters wanted none the less.  After going against the will of the voters twice in 16 years many want to either abolish the Electoral College system altogether , which would require amending the Constitution and that would be a problem because of the Republicans in office, who keep winning that way, would not want to abolish the Electoral College system.  Or at least reform or go around the Electoral College system in a way which would not require amending the Constitution. 

But something else was stolen too, a Supreme Court seat.  During Mr. Obama’s last year in office U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes at age 79.  Mr. Obama did his job and nominated Judge Merrick Garland to that U.S. Supreme Court seat.  The Republicans, who were in the majority in the Senate, would not even give Judge Merrick Garland a hearing to find out if they wanted to confirm him to that Supreme Court seat.  The Republicans just made up a new “rule”, which is not a real rule, that Mr. Obama could not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court in his last year in office.  

The Republicans pulled that one out of their butts because with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia gone the Supreme Court had 4 liberal Justices and 4 conservative Justices so they wanted to get another conservative Justice in that 9th seat to swing court votes their way.  The Senate Republicans held that seat open for a year; they stole that seat from Mr. Obama, the Democrats and the American people.  When Trump was elected he nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to that Supreme Court seat who is even more conservative than Justice Antonin Scalia was.  And they had to go nuclear (change the Senate rules forever) to do it.  Now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sits in that stolen seat.

I and most Democrats agree with the Senate Democrat’s effort to keep Trump’s nominee out of that stolen Supreme Court seat, the only butt that should have gone into that stolen seat was Judge Merrick Garland’s.  The Republicans are obstructionist thieves and thugs; plain and simple.  But now that the Republicans accomplished their goal and successfully stole that seat and put Justice Neil Gorsuch’s butt in it the question then becomes what are we going to do about it.