Emboldened in his job, Mr. Trump has rebelled against Kelly’s restrictions and mused about doing away with the chief of staff post entirely. It’s all leading White House staffers and Trump allies to believe that Kelly is working on borrowed time….
Mr. Trump recently told one confidant that he was “tired of being told no” by Kelly and has instead chosen to simply not tell Kelly things at all, according to a person who was not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Tuesday Reads: Another Day of Information Overload
Posted: April 10, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 39 CommentsGood Morning!!
I’m illustrating this post with some relaxing photos that you can focus on when it all gets to be too much. Personally, I have a pounding headache after surveying the news this morning, and I need something to help me relax.
Information overload has become the new normal. But can it get even worse? Honestly, I believe it will. Yesterday was a shocking day, but today could easily bring more shocks.
Yesterday the FBI executed no-knock raids on the office, home, and hotel room of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen; and Trump threw a public tantrum about it.
The Washington Post: Trump attorney Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud, campaign finance violations.
Michael Cohen, the longtime attorney of President Trump, is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.
FBI agents on Monday raided Cohen’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room as part of the investigation, seizing records about Cohen’s clients and personal finances. Among the records taken were those related to a 2016 payment Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump, according to a fourth person familiar with the investigation.
Investigators took Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records, including tax returns, as part of the search of his office at Rockefeller Center, that person said.
In a dramatic and broad seizure, federal prosecutors collected communications between Cohen and his clients — including those between the lawyer and Trump, according to both people.
Some background on Cohen from Trump biographer Michael Kranish at The Washington Post: Trump lawyer Michael Cohen: The loyal ‘fixer’ now under federal scrutiny.
After setting up a committee in 2011 designed to boost the possibility of a Trump presidential bid, he described his role as “fixer” in this way: “It means that if somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit. If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
Loyalty, he has said, spurred him to regularly threaten lawsuits against those he perceived as threats to Trump. Loyalty, he said, prompted him to use a home equity line of credit to finance a payment of $130,000 to adult-film star Stormy Daniels for her silence.
He even compared himself on Twitter to Ray Donovan, the fictional television character who goes to whatever lengths necessary to fix problems for the moguls he serves.
Basically, Cohen is a mafia-type lawyer with one big client, Donald Trump.
Axios describes the Trump tantrum over yesterdays FBI raids: Inside the West Wing with Trump enraged.
What we’re hearing: One of the sources said: “Mueller’s investigation has been drip, drip. This was a giant leap forward … a personal hit. … They were moving in inches. Today, they moved a mile.”
Some reactions to the Cohen raids and the possible repercussions for Trump:
Adam Serwer at The Atlantic: Michael Cohen Has a Big Problem.
Harry Litman at The New York Times: Trump’s One-Night Stand Turns Into a Legal Nightmare.
Rick Wilson at The Daily Beast: FBI Raid on Michael Cohen Is the Most Dangerous Day of Donald Trump’s Life.
Yesterday was also the first day on the job for Trump’s new National Security Adviser John Bolton, who arrived in the midst of a crisis over a gas attack in Syria. This morning, Bolton fired Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert. Business Insider reports:
President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, has been fired from his White House position, Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs reported on Tuesday.
“The president is grateful for Tom’s commitment to the safety and security of our great country,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement confirming Bossert’s departure. “President Trump thanks him for his patriotic service and wishes him well.”
This comes the day after Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, took over as the president’s third national security adviser. Jacobs reported that Bolton asked for Bossert’s resignation, which was reportedly unexpected.
A former deputy homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, Bossert has been a stalwart defender of the president’s since he joined the administration during the presidential transition, serving as a trusted adviser on terrorism, cybersecurity issues, and natural disasters.
The Cohen raids, obliterated other stories that would have been stunning if they involved a normal president.
AP: Trump’s company asked Panama president to help in hotel spat.
PANAMA CITY (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump’s company appealed directly to Panama’s president to intervene in its fight over control of a luxury hotel, even invoking a treaty between the two countries, in what ethics experts say was a blatant mingling of Trump’s business and government interests.
That appeal in a letter last month from lawyers for the Trump Organization to Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela was apparently unsuccessful — an emergency arbitrator made days later declined to reinstate the Trump management team to the waterfront hotel in Panama City. But it provides hard proof of exactly the kind of conflict experts feared when Trump refused to divest from a sprawling empire that includes hotels, golf courses, licensing deals and other interests in more than 20 countries….
In the March 22 letter to Varela, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, lawyers for the Trump Organization “URGENTLY” request the Panamanian leader’s influence to help reverse the company’s acrimonious eviction as managers of the 70-story luxury high-rise once known as the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower.
While never mentioning Trump or his role as president, the letter says lawyers representing the Trump Organization were aware of “the separation of powers” in Panama but essentially asks the country’s president to intervene in the judicial process anyway. It goes on to say that the eviction violates an investment treaty signed by the two countries and suggests that the Panamanian government, not the hotel’s new management team, could be blamed for any wrongdoing.
So basically, the Trump Organization threatened that the U.S. government could retaliate against a foreign government over the president’s business interests!
The New York Times: Mueller Investigating Ukrainian’s $150,000 Payment for a Trump Appearance.
The special counsel is investigating a payment made to President Trump’s foundation by a Ukrainian steel magnate for a talk during the campaign, according to three people briefed on the matter, as part of a broader examination of streams of foreign money to Mr. Trump and his associates in the years leading up to the election.
Investigators subpoenaed the Trump Organization this year for an array of records about business with foreign nationals. In response, the company handed over documents about a $150,000 donation that the Ukrainian billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, made in September 2015 to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in exchange for a 20-minute appearanceby Mr. Trump that month through a video link to a conference in Kiev.
Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer whose office and hotel room were raided on Monday in an apparently unrelated case, solicited the donation. The contribution from Mr. Pinchuk, who has sought closer ties for Ukraine to the West, was the largest the foundation received in 2015 from anyone besides Mr. Trump himself.
The subpoena is among signs in recent months that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is interested in interactions that Mr. Trump or his associates had with countries beyond Russia, though it is not clear what other payments he is scrutinizing.
Mr. Mueller also ordered the Trump Organization to turn over documents, emails and other communications about several Russians, including some whose names have not been publicly tied to Mr. Trump, according to the three people, who would not be named discussing the ongoing investigation. The identities of the Russians were unclear.
The payment from Mr. Pinchuk “is curious because it comes during a campaign and is from a foreigner and looks like an effort to buy influence,” said Marcus S. Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. He called the donation “an unusual amount of money for such a short speech.”
Betsy Woodruff reported at The Daily Beast on more legal trouble for Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort: A Second Paul Manafort Associate Has Turned on Him.
According to court documents, one of Manafort’s former employees led an FBI agent to a storage locker filled with paperwork on Manafort’s businesses and finances. The person’s name is redacted from the filings. But he’s now at the center of a fight over evidence that could play a significant role in the government’s case against Manafort….
This makes the second Manafort associate known to have aided the government in the sprawling investigation into foreign influence in U.S. politics. Rick Gates, Manafort’s long-time right hand, began cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in February.
Manafort’s attorneys revealed the information about the second former employee in an April 6, 2018, court filing. In the filing, Manafort’s attorneys asked the federal judge overseeing the prosecution to block documents found in a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia, from being used as evidence against him. They argue the employee did not have the authority to let the FBI agent look into the storage unit, and that, therefore, the FBI violated Manafort’s Fourth Amendment rights.
Read the details at the link.
More news on the Russia investigation broke this morning at CNN: Roger Stone said in July 2016 Russians were ‘most likely’ behind WikiLeaks emails and doing it to help Trump.
Longtime Trump associate Roger Stone said several times in July 2016 that Russia was most likely the source for hacked emails released during the Democratic National Convention and that it was not far-fetched to say the purpose was to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to a CNN KFile review of Stone’s interviews and appearances.
The comments, made by Stone from late July through August 1, 2016, show Stone stated at the time that Russia was the source of the emails — a sharp contrast to his more recent posture that Russia was not the source for hacked documents released by WikiLeaks throughout the campaign.By August 4, 2016, the same day Stone claimed in an email to have dined with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the night prior, Stone abruptly changed his tune. In a conference call along with an interview with radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Stone said that Russia had nothing to do with the hacked emails and they were the sole work of hacker Guccifer 2.0….
The 2016 comments raise more questions and add to an already murky picture about what Stone knew about WikiLeaks and why he subsequently — and seemingly suddenly — began to rule out the Russians as the source of the emails.
“The reason that the Russians are probably leaking this information is because they don’t want a nuclear war either. (Hillary Clinton) is bent on a war that benefits her donors and the multinational corporations and the defense contractors,” Stone told Jones on a July 27, 2016, edition of Jones’ program.
Several days later, on July 31, 2016, Stone said again the Russians were the most likely source for the material.“The fact that the Russians will — or whoever — are going to continue to drop bombs on the American people in the form of their own documents. Alex, these are like the Watergate tapes. The Clintons have cut their own throat because they assume that no one would ever see all of their secret illegal maneuverings,” Stone told Jones. “This is why they used the unsecured server to hide the very things that I suspect someone — most likely the Russians — is going to drop on the American people like truthbombs throughout this election. She can raise a billion dollars and it may not matter. Trump may beat her like a drum as he pounces on and helps further public knowledge of every one of the bombshells that is coming.”
Read more 2016 direct quotes from Stone at the link.
I’ll have a few more links in the comment thread below. What stories are you following today? And when it comes to storage units, you can rely on and get help from boat storage units redmond wa, they have best service and brandnew storage facility. Go check it now.
Lazy Saturday Reads
Posted: April 7, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: China, Donald Trump, information overload, James Mattis, John Bolton, John Kelly, Stock Market, Syria, tariffs, trade war 35 Comments
Woman Reading by a Window Gari Melchers – circa 1905
Good Afternoon!!
I’ve been trying to find out where Trump is this weekend. I haven’t heard anything about him going to Florida, and I’m afraid that may mean there will be more chaos in the White House over the weekend. Will Scott Pruitt lose his job? Or will Trump really try to use him to replace Jeff Sessions? Is Trump really preparing to talk to Robert Mueller, as CNN reports?
Exclusive: Trump begins informal prep for potential Mueller interview.
President Donald Trump has begun the initial steps of preparing for a possible interview with the special counsel, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Friday, a sign the President’s legal team is intensifying its deliberations over whether to allow him to come under Robert Mueller’s questioning.
One source familiar with the proceedings stressed the preparation efforts is “in its infancy.”
The preparations have been short and informal and included going over potential topics with the President that Mueller would likely raise in an interview, the people said.The President has not formally agreed to sit for an interview with Mueller.
But word of early preparations is the clearest sign yet that Trump and his team remain open to an interview with Mueller, despite concerns from some people close to the President that such an interview could expose him to possible charges of perjury.
According to Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair, Trump is now targeting one of his last “adult” advisers: Running Out of Punching Bags, Trump Turns on Mattis.
Drinking Coffee And Reading In The Garden Painting by Edward Killingworth Johnson
Until recently, Donald Trump’s campaign to purge naysayers had spared the Pentagon. In the absence of more proximate targets, however, it appears the president has turned his attention to foreign policy, jeopardizing his relationship with perhaps his only remaining sane adviser. Indeed, in the past week, Trump has made James Mattis’s job nearly impossible by declaring that he would send the military to guard the border with Mexico (the White House later clarified that he meant the National Guard), and insisting that the U.S. pull out of Syria (something Mattis promised last year would not happen), leading to a spectacular showdown on Tuesday, when the conflict between Trump and his generals reportedly boiled over during a meeting of top aides in the Situation Room.
According to the Associated Press, Mattis argued “that an immediate withdrawal” from Syria “could be catastrophic and was logistically impossible to pull off in any responsible way,” and offered a one-year timeline as an alternative—to which Trump responded that five or six months ought to do the trick, and “indicated that he did not want to hear in October that the military had been unable to fully defeat the Islamic State and had to remain in Syria for longer.” A person familiar with the meeting told CNN that attendees left Tuesday’s meeting “beside themselves,” arguing that Trump’s lack of desire to put together any sort of recovery plan for Syria—restoring basic needs such as water, power, and roads—would most certainly tip the country back into ISIS’s hands. “It is a huge gamble that ISIS is not going to come back and that we are going to rely on others to stabilize Syria,” an official said.
The same official noted the hypocrisy in Trump’s choice: “The president blasted Obama for a timeline in Iraq, but that is in essence what we have been given.”
It wasn’t the result top national security aides wanted. Trump’s desire for a rapid withdrawal faced unanimous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community, all of which argued that keeping the 2,000 U.S. soldiers currently in Syria is key to ensuring the Islamic State does not reconstitute itself.
Adolfe Monet reading in the garden, by Claude Monet
But as they huddled in the Situation Room, the president was vocal and vehement in insisting that the withdrawal be completed quickly if not immediately, according to five administration officials briefed on Tuesday’s White House meeting of Trump and his top aides. The officials weren’t authorized to discuss internal deliberations and requested anonymity.
If those aides failed in obtaining their desired outcome, it may have been because a strategy that’s worked in the past — giving Trump an offer he can’t refuse — appears to have backfired.
Rather than offer Trump a menu of pullout plans, with varying timelines and options for withdrawing step-by-step, the team sought to frame it as a binary choice: Stay in Syria to ensure the Islamic State can’t regroup, or pull out completely. Documents presented to the president included several pages of possibilities for staying in, but only a brief description of an option for full withdrawal that emphasized significant risks and downsides, including the likelihood that Iran and Russia would take advantage of a U.S. vacuum.
Ultimately, Trump chose that option anyway.
Will Mattis resign if Trump insists on pulling the U.s. military out of Syria? Or will Trump fire him? John Bolton is expected to begin his job as National Security Adviser on Monday. Will he agree with Trump’s newly formed foreign policy?
Chief of Staff John Kelly has also lost influence on the newly “emboldened” Trump according to CBS News: Trump freezes out chief of staff John Kelly, says he’s “tired of being told ‘no.'”
When President Donald Trump made a congratulatory phone call to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, White House chief of staff John Kelly wasn’t on the line. When Mr. Trump tapped John Bolton to be his next national security adviser, Kelly wasn’t in the room.
And when Mr. Trump spent a Mar-a-Lago weekend stewing over immigration and trade, Kelly wasn’t in sight.
Oscar Bluhm In the Pergola, 1892
Kelly, once empowered to bring order to a turbulent West Wing, has receded from view, his clout diminished, his word less trusted by staff and his guidance less tolerated by an increasingly go-it-alone president.
The stock market isn’t happy with Trump’s push for a trade war. Yahoo News (AP): Stock Market Plummets After Trump Explores $100 Billion in New Chinese Tariffs.
Another increase in trade tensions has stocks falling sharply Friday as the U.S. considers an even larger set of tariffs on imports from China and the two countries exchange pointed statements. Technology companies and banks are taking some of the worst losses.
Stocks have changed direction again and again this week as investors tried to get a sense of whether a trade dispute between the two nations will escalate, an outcome that could have major consequences for the global economy. The market didn’t get any help from a March jobs report that was weaker than expected.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell dropped 581 points, or 2.4 percent, to 23,916 as of 2:15 p.m. Eastern time. Earlier it fell as much as 620 points.
The S&P 500, which many index funds track, lost 53 points, or 2 percent, to 2,608. The Nasdaq composite slid 135 points, or 1.9 percent, to 6,940. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks dipped 29 points, or 1.9 percent, to 1,513.
The Dow average, which contains numerous multinational companies including industrial powerhouses Boeing and Caterpillar, has swung dramatically this week, with about 1,300 points separating its highest and lowest marks. It fell as much as 758 points Monday, then recovered all of those losses, and late Thursday it was up as much as 519 points for the week. It’s down 0.7 percent for the week.
Reading in the garden, 1915 – Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky
Donald Trump has decided to gamble his presidency on the idea that he can threaten big tariffs on China and force the world’s second-largest economy to back down.
If he fails — and the odds are that he will — the fallout from a tariff battle with China could derail an otherwise strong U.S. economy, threaten Republican majorities in the midterm elections and turn the second half of Trump’s first term into a dismal slog to avoid impeachment votes.
So far, the exact scenario that free traders inside the White House and on Capitol Hill feared is playing out. China scoffed at Trump’s initial $50 billion in threatened tariffs and announced their own, aimed directly at Trump’s red-state base with levies on agricultural and manufactured products.
Although Trump has repeatedly bragged about stock market gains since he has been “president,” Bloomberg reports that Trump is now in 8th place in rankings of presidential success with the markets:
The Republican president’s renewed ramblings on trade dominated U.S. equity markets this week, with a tweet-induced swoon on Friday leaving the S&P 500 Index 1.4 percent lower than where it started on Monday. The gauge swung wildly, notching four moves of at least 1 percent in the five days, and the Cboe Volatility Index spiked above 20, nearly double its level for the past year.
All of which has dented Trump’s reputation as the stock market president.
Dow Jones Industrial Average return, if you invested in that basket of stocks, for a president’s first 444 days (ranked since 1900,) per Bloomberg:
FDR : 70.4%
Reagan: 41.4%
Teddy Roosevelt: 37.4%
Obama: 32.5%
Bill Clinton: 32.2%
George H.W. Bush: 21.4%
Trump: 20.7%
BTW, according to Think Progress, Trump doesn’t want his trade war to interfere with his daughter’s self-dealing: Ivanka Trump’s clothing company will be spared from tariffs, thanks to her dad.
U.S. officials say they used an algorithm to determine which goods to exclude from new tariffs. According to the Washington Post, the list was drafted to achieve “the lowest consumer impact,” ensuring goods like clothing and toys were excluded so as not to raise the cost on domestic consumer goods.
Reading Man in Park — August Macke 1915
Exempting clothing from the tariffs provides a big break to American clothing companies that hold trademarks in China. One of those clothing companies belongs to the First Daughter of the United States, Ivanka Trump.
A recent report by the Huffington Post found that the president’s daughter and closest adviser rakes in a total of $1.5 million a year from the Trump Organization while still working at the White House.
Her dual role as adviser to the president and private business executive has continuously raised ethical red flags. No one can be entirely sure that public policy by this administration isn’t being driven by business motives, or whether countries may pursue business deals with the Trump family as a means to curry political favor with the administration.
Once again, I’ve barely touched on all the important news that has broken over the past couple of days. I’ve reached the point of having to shut down for part of every day, because I’m so overwhelmed. Of course I’m not alone it that. In this vein Brian Klaas asks at The Washington Post: Can democracy survive information overload?
Last month, President Trump floated the idea of executing drug dealers; got sued by a porn star and a Playboy model; repeatedly attacked the FBI, his own attorney general and the Justice Department; instigated a trade war that punished long-standing U.S. allies; explicitly praised authoritarian consolidations of power in China and Egypt; “joked” about becoming “president for life”; congratulated Vladimir Putin on winning a sham election and reportedly invited him to the White House right after Russia’s government allegedly attempted to murder a former spy on the soil of the United States’ closest ally.
He also bullied a journalist for his physical appearance; boasted about making up statistics in meetings with Canada’s government; live-tweeted his favorite TV show; fired his secretary of state on Twitter; lost his Veterans Affairs secretary, national security adviser, chief economic adviser, communications director and a personal aide whose reported gambling habit was deemed a security risk; hired a new national security adviser who has repeatedly called to bomb North Korea and Iran; lashed out at the special counsel, who is investigating the president for potential crimes; and threatened to beat up the former vice president of the United States until he cried.
Woman Reading in a Garden by Harold Harvey
That’s just a small selection of news from March 2018: one crazy month of one crazy presidency.
This inescapable, overwhelming and disorienting flurry of activity, which has become the new normal since Trump’s inauguration, begs two simple but profound questions: Can democracy survive information overload? And can it survive a president who knows how to use the resulting chaos to dodge democratic accountability?
Authoritarian rulers have long understood that controlling and manipulating information are crucial to subverting democracy and getting away with breaking the rules. That’s why dictatorial governments such as China and Russia not only work overtime to control media and censor inconvenient facts but also use troll armies to spew out 24/7 torrents of disinformation. Despite Trump’s obvious envy of such methods, he’s stuck with American democracy, so he has innovated out of necessity. He can’t shut down the press or censor Democrats, but he can blind the American electorate with a steady smokescreen of bewildering stories pouring out of the White House.
From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, any one of those stories above would have captivated national attention for weeks, or more likely, months. But with Trump, even the most scandalous topic soon disappears into a never-ending flow of revelations. By the time the morning news shows end, it’s on to the next spectacle of dysfunction. We’re living in a chronic state of whiplash.
Thursday Reads: The Usual Insanity Reigns in Trump World
Posted: April 5, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: abortion rights, Cecile Richards, Donald Trump, fake news, immigrant caravan, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, Luke Harding, Melania Trump, Paul Manafort, Planned Parenthood, Ronald Kessler, Simon City Royals, Victor Yanukovych, white gangs 30 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
As usual, there’s way too much news out there this morning. In Trump world, there’s never an opportunity to catch your breath and focus on one important thing. I can’t cover everything, so here are some random stories that caught my interest.
Cecile Richards has a new book out–Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead: My Life Story–and she included some creepy revelations about Jared and Ivanka Kushner. People Magazine: Planned Parenthood CEO Says Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Offered ‘Bribe’ to Stop Abortions.
In a riveting passage from Cecile Richards’ new memoir, the Planned Parenthood chief says Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were, during Donald Trump’s 2016 transition as president-elect, so eager to be recognized as shrewd political dealmakers that the soon-to-be first daughter and her husband made an offer that felt like a “bribe”: an increase in federal funding for Planned Parenthood in exchange for its agreement to stop providing abortions.
Richards says she “reached out” to Ivanka at the suggestion of a friend, in hopes of finding an ally in the Trump White House. Ivanka insisted on bringing Jared, so Richards asked her husband Kirk Adams to come with her.
According to a statement from Planned Parenthood given to Time.com, the purpose of the meeting “was to make sure that Ivanka Trump fully understood the important role Planned Parenthood plays in providing health care to millions of people and why it would be a disastrous idea to block people from accessing care at Planned Parenthood.”
After Richards explained this, she writes that Kushner told her Planned Parenthood “had made a big mistake by becoming ‘political.’ ”
“The main issue, he explained, was abortion,” Richards writes. “If Planned Parenthood wanted to keep our federal funding, we would have to stop providing abortions. He described his ideal outcome: a national headline reading ‘Planned Parenthood Discontinues Abortion Services.’”
According to Make Trouble, Kushner said that if Richards agreed to the plan then funding could increase, but he urged them to “move fast.”
“If it wasn’t crystal clear before, it was now. Jared and Ivanka were there for one reason: to deliver a political win,” she writes. “In their eyes, if they could stop Planned Parenthood from providing abortions, it would confirm their reputation as savvy dealmakers. It was surreal, essentially being asked to barter away women’s rights for more money. It takes a lot to get Kirk mad, but it looked like his head was about to explode.”
Richards explained that there was “no way” Kushner’s proposal would work and that they’d continue to fight for funding.
“‘Our mission is to care for women who need us, and that means caring for all of their reproductive needs — including safe and legal abortion,’” she recalls saying.
Can you imagine the nerve? In Trump world, everything is about money. These people can’t even begin to conceive of the notion that there are people with personal values that are non-negotiable.
There’s another new book about Trump world–this time by Trump booster Ronald Kessler. Still, a few embarrassing tidbits are coming out in advice of its release date.
The Cut: Trump Reportedly Called Jared Kushner a ‘Little Boy.’
According to journalist Ronald Kessler in his new book, The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game, when Kushner addressed reporters during a live television appearance, President Trump told the aides watching with him, “Look at Jared, he looks like a little boy, like a child.”
Kessler also claims that Trump once told Kushner and his daughter, Ivanka, that “they never should have left New York,” and he “made it clear to them that he would not mind if they gave up their White House roles.” [….]
Trump calling Jared “a child” seems rather unfair. Not only has president given his son-in-law a set of absurdly stratospheric, decidedly adult responsibilities, Kushner clearly looks more like a haunted doll than a little boy.
Kessler writes that Kellyanne Conway is the “number one leaker” in the White House except for Trump himself, who leaks as as an “anonymous source” to specific reporters in hopes of positive coverage. According to Kessler, Melania Trump is an important adviser to her husband, and she once “walked out on” Trump in 1998 when she found out he was cheating on her. Now you don’t have to read the book, which reported is filled with Trump boosterism.
Luke Harding, who wrote the terrific book Collusion, has a new piece on Paul Manafort’s machinations at The Guardian: Former Trump aide approved ‘black ops’ to help Ukraine president.
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president, featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites, and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.
The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.
The strategies included:
• Proposing to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.
• Setting up a fake “thinktank” in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.
• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.
• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton, when she was US secretary of state.
Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipates later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Another interesting long read from The Guardian by Donna Ladd: Dangerous, growing, yet unnoticed: the rise of America’s white gangs. It’s a portrait of one man–Benny Ivy–who as a kid joined “one of the oldest and largest white gangs in the US, the Simon City Royals.”
The Royals’ roots date to Chicago’s North Side in 1952, when two violent white “greaser” gangs – the Ashland Royals and Simon City – guarded Simon Park turf as Puerto Ricans moved in.
Early greasers were immigrants, often Italian, maligned by wealthier whites for greasing machines in blue-collar jobs. In 1968, the greasers united as the Simon City Royals, often rumbling with the nearby Latin Kings as well as the white supremacist Gaylords. (Their rhetoric is familiar: a Gaylords nostalgia websitecalled Latino gangs “storage bins for illegal immigrants”.)
The Royals were one of the biggest and most violent street gangs in Chicago by the 1970s, when they joined the Folk Nation alliance with the Black Gangster Disciples, began admitting Hispanics and, later, women and black members.
But by the 1980s, the gang had weakened after its leadership got locked up or killed.
Strength shifted to prisons, and the brand spread to midwestern and southern states like Mississippi, where the Royals are now one of the largest and most violent gangs in the state.
Surveys of young Americans have shown that 40% identifying as gang members are white, but police tend to undercount them at 10% to 14% and overcount black and Hispanic members, says Babe Howell, a criminal law professor at City University of New York who focuses on crime and race.
“Police see groups of young white people as individuals, each responsible for his or her own conduct, and hold young people of color in street gangs criminally liable for the conduct of their peers,” she says.
Much more at the link.
Trump is insisting on sending National Guard troops to the southern border because he heard about a so-called “caravan” of migrants marching across Mexico. We now have a “president” who uses to executive ordered to deal with fake crises. Trump probably doesn’t know that U.S. troops can’t take any actions against people to enforce domestic laws because of the Posse Commitatus Act. So he’s sending the troops down there anyway instead of just letting them train to do their real jobs. So what about this “caravan?”
The New York Times: ‘You Hate America!’: How the ‘Caravan’ Story Exploded on the Right.
It was the kind of story destined to take a dark turn through the conservative news media and grab President Trump’s attention: A vast horde of migrants was making its way through Mexico toward the United States, and no one was stopping them.
A Central American woman gives water to a baby as a large group of immigrants sets up camp for a few days at a sports center in Matias Romero in Mexico’s Oaxaca state late Monday. (Felix Marquez / Associated Press)
“Mysterious group deploys ‘caravan’ of illegal aliens headed for U.S. border,” warned Frontpage Mag, a site run by David Horowitz, a conservative commentator.
The Gateway Pundit, a website that was most recently in the news for spreading conspiracies about the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., suggested the real reason the migrants were trying to enter the United States was to collect social welfare benefits.
And as the president often does when immigration is at issue, he saw a reason for Americans to be afraid. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” a Twitter post from Mr. Trump read.
The story of “the caravan” followed an arc similar to many events — whether real, embellished or entirely imagined — involving refugees and migrants that have roused intense suspicion and outrage on the right. The coverage tends to play on the fears that hiding among mass groups of immigrants are many criminals, vectors of disease and agents of terror. And often the president, who announced his candidacy by blaming Mexico for sending rapists and drug dealers into the United States, acts as an accelerant to the hysteria.
That’s the fake story, now for the real story.
The New York Times: Inside an Immigrant Caravan: Women and Children, Fleeing Violence.
MATÍAS ROMERO, Mexico — With a sarcastic half-smile, Nikolle Contreras, 27, surveyed her fellow members of the Central American caravan, which President Trump has called dangerous and has used as a justification to send troops to the border.
More than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, waited patiently on Wednesday in the shade of trees and makeshift shelters in a rundown sports complex in this Mexican town, about 600 miles south of the border. They were tired, having slept and eaten poorly for more than a week. All were facing an uncertain future.
“Imagine that!” said Ms. Contreras, a Honduran factory worker hoping to apply for asylum in the United States. “So many problems he has to solve and he gets involved with this caravan!”
The migrants, most of them Hondurans, left the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula on March 25 and for days traveled north en masse — by foot, hitchhiking and on the tops of trains — as they fled violence and poverty in their homelands and sought a better life elsewhere.
This sort of collective migration has become something of an annual event around Easter week, and a way for advocates to draw more attention to the plight of migrants.
But this particular caravan caught the attention of Mr. Trump, apparently after he heard about it on Fox News. In a Twitter tirade that began Sunday, he conjured up hordes of dangerous migrants surging toward the border. He demanded that Mexican officials halt the group, suggesting that otherwise he would make them pay dearly in trade negotiations or aid cuts.
Mr. Trump even boasted that his threat had forced Mexico’s government to halt and disperse the caravan participants. But there was no evidence of that on Wednesday.
Read the rest at the NYT.
What stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads: Trump’s Attacks on the Press and Mueller News
Posted: April 3, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics 40 Comments
Henry Matisse, La femme en jaune, 1928
Good Afternoon!!
I’m having another one of those mornings. I’m scared to death about the way Trump is behaving, and I can’t get my brain to pull together a coherent understanding of what’s happening.
Trump’s latest obsession has been attacking the free press from multiple directions. He’s attacking Amazon and because Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and The Washington Post, which Trump hates. At the same time, Trump tries to boost Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting, because they suck up to him. Should we be worried?
Brian Klaas, an expert on authoritarianism thinks so.
BTW, Trump’s attacks on Amazon have caused the company’s stocks to lose value. Can investors sue Trump for that?
There are so many tentacles to what he’s doing with his corrupt self-dealing, his sucking up to dictators like Putin and Sisi, his attacks on the press, and his undermining of federal law enforcement. What can we do about it? It seems we can’t do much but hope that Robert Mueller finds more crimes to prosecute until he eventually gets to Trump. But will our democracy ultimately survive the Trump onslaught?
Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair: “Trump is like ‘How Can I F–k With Him'” Trump’s War With Amazon (And The Washington Post) Is Personal.
Trump has ripped into Amazon in recent days, claiming in a series of tweets that Jeff Bezos’s tech giant benefits from billions in subsidies from the U.S. Post office while skirting sales taxes. “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” Trump tweeted. On Monday, he wrote: “Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon. THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country . . . not a level playing field!” The tweets caused Amazon’s stock to plunge 5 percent on Monday.
The Music, Henri Matisse
Now, according to four sources close to the White House, Trump is discussing ways to escalate his Twitter attacks on Amazon to further damage the company. “He’s off the hook on this. It’s war,” one source told me. “He gets obsessed with something, and now he’s obsessed with Bezos,” said another source. “Trump is like, how can I fuck with him?”
According to sources, Trump wants the Post Office to increase Amazon’s shipping costs. When Trump previously discussed the idea inside the White Hose, Gary Cohn had explained that Amazon is a benefit to the Postal Service, which has seen mail volume plummet in the age of e-mail. “Trump doesn’t have Gary Cohn breathing down his neck saying you can’t do the Post Office shit,” a Republican close to the White House said. “He really wants the Post Office deal renegotiated. He thinks Amazon’s getting a huge fucking deal on shipping.”
Advisers are also encouraging Trump to cancel Amazon’s pending multi-billion contract with the Pentagon to provide cloud computing services, sources say. Another line of attack would be to encourage attorneys general in red states to open investigations into Amazon’s business practices. Sources say Trump is open to the ideas.
Clearly Trump is a moron, but he’s doing a lot damage anyway. Couldn’t Bezos sue him?
NPR says that Trump is causing the Postal Service’s problems: As Trump Attacks Amazon-Postal Service Ties, He Fails To Fill Postal Governing Board.
The top planning and oversight board at the Postal Service has been unable to meet and consider matters such as the agency’s long-term relationship with Amazon, because the president has failed to appoint any of the nine governors to the 11-member Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.
Henri Matisse – Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar, 1939 at the Art Institute of Chicago IL
In October, Trump nominated three candidates, who still await Senate confirmation. The board needs at least four new members to have a quorum for meetings, which prompted concerns from a bipartisan group of senators late last year.
“Without a quorum, the Postal Service cannot make key operational decisions or provide accountability for operational deficiencies, such as intentional mail delays, drug trafficking through the Postal Service’s network, and dramatically falling mail volumes and revenue,” according to a November letter to President Trump from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
More details at NPR.
And what about the Sinclair Broadcast Group and their takeover of hundreds of local stations? Trump has been promoting Sinclair on his Twitter feed.
At Politico, Jack Shafer writes: Trump Wants to Promote Sinclair? Let Him. As long as I can still change the channel, who cares?
I intend no defense of Sinclair by pointing out that Sinclair’s brand of conservative news lies well within an established American tradition. To begin with, American newspapers were captive to political parties for the better part of the 19th century, forever claiming that their competitors were printing the malarkey of fake news. In the modern era, William Randolph Hearst made it his business to tell his readers what to think in the pages of his national newspaper chain. Henry Luce likewise applied a political whetstone to Time magazine and his other titles to give them a conservative edge. Colonel Robert R. McCormick turned his Chicago Tribune into a permanent campaign against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Three months before the 1936 election, the Tribune ran a Page 1 anti-Roosevelt headline that read, “Only 97 Days Left to Save Your Country!’’ In more recent decades, banking heir Richard Mellon Scaife spent tens of millions to create a conservative Pittsburgh newspaper and convicted felon Rev. Sun Myung Moon spent billions on his conservative Washington Times. And don’t forget Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel.
Woman at the Piano, 1924, by Henri Matisse
The moral panic over Sinclair Broadcast Group’s stupid promo might make sense if its TV stations were beamed directly into our skulls, George Orwell style. I might join the liberal dither if Sinclair wiped out its competition on the dial. But as long as I can still change my local channel and avoid Sinclair’s partisan hackery, where’s the crisis?
I don’t know what to think. I never watch local news, so I had to check to see if Sinclair owns any Boston stations. They don’t, but they apparently own some in Maine and Rhode Island, according to this Boston Globe editorial. I tend to find the situation worrisome, but it’s all part of the consolidation of media ownership that has gone on for decades. It seems concerning that Comcast owns NBC too.
And then there’s this old Politico article that Howard Dean called attention to on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/GovHowardDean/status/980932414112456706
Politico: Kushner: We struck deal with Sinclair for straighter coverage.
Donald Trump’s campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives Friday in Manhattan.
Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.
In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.
“It’s math,” Kushner said according to multiple attendees.
Woman with Mandolin, by Henri Matisse
But Sinclair and other networks said such a deal is nothing nefarious or new – just an arrangement for extended sit-down interviews with both candidates, one many campaigns have done in previous years to get around the national media and directly to viewers in key states.
Scott Livingston, vice president of news at Sinclair, said the offer for extended interviews with local anchors was made to both candidates. Trump did a handful of interviews, while Sen. Tim Kaine did a few as well, though Hillary Clinton did not.
One more topical article to consider from The Washington Post: A new study suggests fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election.
The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton’s support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama’s 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.
Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck and Erik C. Nisbet, the study’s authors, inserted three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn’t vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).
Read all the details at the WaPo.
Some news on the Mueller investigation broke early this morning.
Bloomberg: Mueller Releases Secret Memo Underpinning Manafort Probe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller defended the indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort by releasing a secret government memorandum granting him authority to investigate crimes related to Manafort’s political consulting work for former President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine.
Young woman at the piano, Henri Matisse
Mueller is using the memo to refute Manafort’s claims that prosecutors went too far by investigating crimes beyond Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors released the memo just before midnight on Monday, arguing that Manafort can’t legally challenge his indictment for financial crimes arising from his work for Yanukovych and other Russian-backed politicians.
The memo, dated Aug. 2, 2017, and signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, supplements a May 2017 appointment order directing Mueller to investigate possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly” from his probe….
In releasing the heavily redacted memo, Mueller argued that Rosenstein “left no doubt that the conduct that forms the basis for the indictment is within the special counsel’s jurisdiction.” Manafort faces a pair of indictments charging him with earning tens of millions of dollars in Ukraine, laundering much of that money, failing to register as a foreign agent and cheating on his taxes.
Mueller also cited business ties between Manafort and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Any investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign “would naturally cover ties that a former Trump campaign manager had to Russian-associated political operatives, Russian-backed politicians, and Russian oligarchs,” according to the 53-page filing in federal court in Washington.
“It would also naturally look into any interactions they may have had before and during the campaign to plumb motives and opportunities to coordinate and to expose possible channels for surreptitious communications,” prosecutors wrote. “And prosecutors would naturally follow the money trail from Manafort’s Ukrainian consulting activities. Because investigation of those matters was authorized, so was prosecution.”
We’ll probably learn more about this in the course of today.
An interesting tweet from Ned Price:
So . . . what do you think? What stories are you following today?
Lazy Saturday Reads
Posted: March 31, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 12 Comments
Booklover, by Josephine Margaret Muntz Adams
Good Morning!!
Trump is enjoying another long weekend of golf in Florida, so presumably he won’t blow up the world between now and Monday. However, he did leave behind a couple of stunning announcements: one is just ludicrous and the other could be disastrous.
Vice News on the ludicrous one: Trump announces Sexual Assault Awareness Month with heartfelt, typo-ridden memo.
President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women and who was once caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy,” announced Friday that April would be “National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.”
In a typo-riddled White House statement, Trump pledged to raise awareness of sexual assault and to hold offenders accountable, since “these heinous crimes are committed indiscriminately.”
“We must not be afraid to talk about sexual assualt [sic] and sexual assult [sic] prevention with our loved ones, in our communities, and with those who have experienced these tragedies,” he said. “We must encourage victims to report sexual assault and law enforcement to hold offenders accountable, and we must support victims and survivors unremmittingly [sic]. Through a concerted effort to better educate ourselves, empower victims, and punish criminals, our Nation will move closer to ending the grief, fear, and suffering caused by sexual assult [sic].”
Trump also announced that the White House will create the Sexual Assault Victim Intervention Services Technical Assistance Center, which will help local organizations understand how to best support survivors of sexual assault.
Who knows what prompted that announcement. I doubt if Trump even knew about it.
The more serious announcement was Trump’s remark in a “speech” in Ohio that “We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” CNN reported:
Girl Reading, by Vera Alabaster
President Donald Trump said Thursday that the US would “be coming out of Syria like very soon,” just hours after the Pentagon highlighted the need for US troops to remain in the country for the immediate future.
“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now,” Trump told supporters at an Ohio event on infrastructure.
“We are going to have 100% of the caliphate, as they call it, sometimes referred to as land … But we are going to be coming out of there real soon. We are going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be,” Trump added.
One US defense official directly familiar with the ISIS campaign said it is unclear what the President meant by the comments. The military’s current assessment is that now is not the time to consider withdrawal, citing numerous challenges in Syria.
By the way, this came in a “speech” that was supposedly about infrastructure. More from CNN:
Who stands to gain if Trump pulls the US out of Syria?
The President’s apparent desire to exit Syria as soon as possible is likely to raise concerns among US backed groups in the region, particularly the SDF, and could embolden the forces of the Syrian regime, Iran and Turkey, all of which have mostly resisted attacking US allies in Syria due to concerns about US retaliation….
If the US were to withdraw, the de facto spheres of influence that have spared eastern Syria the same kind of fighting and bloodshed that the civil war has brought to the west would likely collapse, inviting a major escalation in the conflict.
That chaos could be exploited by ISIS which has already benefited from Turkey’s actions in northern Syria.Earlier this month, the US warned that ISIS has begun reconstituting in some areas of Syria because a Turkish military offensive against a northern city has pulled the US’ Kurdish allies away from the fight against the terrorist group.
“We are very concerned about the effect fighting there has had on our defeat ISIS efforts and would like to see an end to the hostilities before ISIS has the opportunity to regroup in eastern Syria,” said Pentagon spokesman US Army Col. Rob Manning, discussing the Turkish offensive against Afrin.
Portrait of Lucie Reading, by Jacques-Emile Blanche
The State Department went a step farther, saying that ISIS has already begun to rebuild in places.
“The fighting in western Syria over the last two months, including in Afrin, has distracted from the defeat ISIS campaign and provided opportunity for ISIS to begin reconstituting in some areas,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said last week.
I guess Jim Mattis will be busy trying to explain all this to the moronic dunderhead when he returns from his golfing trip. I wonder what the new National Security Adviser John Bolton will think about it?
Obviously racism is alive and and thriving in Trump’s Amerika. Black men are regularly shot and killed by police officers, and this White House thinks that’s just a “local matter.” The Root: Police Shooting and Killing Black Men? It’s Not the White House’s Problem, Sarah Huckabee Sanders Says .
On March 18, two police officers in Sacramento, Calif., shot and killed 22-year-old Stephon Clark in the backyard of his grandparents’ home. It is not the first extrajudicial execution of a black man by police, and if there is no change soon, it likely won’t be the last. The nation is watching the aftermath of this shooting play out, and understandably, many of us have questions for both local and national government leaders as to what—if anything—will be done to prevent something like this from happening again.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, aka Suckabee, was asked if the White House had any response to the public outcry for justice in the shootings of black men and women at the hands of police. Sanders said, “This is something that is a local matter, and that’s something that we feel should be left up to the local authorities at this point in time,” adding that the president is in full support of law enforcement officers.
I’m sure Attorney General Jeff Sessions agrees.
More on the Stephon Clark murder at the LA Times: Hundreds protest Stephon Clark killing as autopsy raises new questions.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Sacramento late Friday and early Saturday morning as new details emerged about the police killing of an unarmed African American man earlier this month….
The Pink Dress, by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, (1841-1920) The pink dress
It was the latest of numerous demonstrations in support of Stephon Clark, an African American man killed by police who, according to an independent forensic pathologist’s report Friday, was shot six times in the back.
Dr. Bennet Omalu conducted an autopsy days after Clark was killed by police. He told reporters that his examination showed that Clark was hit by eight bullets, and all but one entered while his back was turned toward the two officers.
One bullet entered Clark’s left thigh from the front and was probably fired while he was on the ground and had already been shot multiple times, Omalu said.
The independent autopsy finding raises new questions about Clark’s shooting, which is now the subject of investigations by both local and state officials. The county coroner’s official autopsy results are not expected to be completed for several weeks.
Clark, 22, was fatally shot in his grandmother’s backyard on March 18 by Sacramento police, who were looking for a vandal in the neighborhood. More than 20 shots were fired. Clark was found with a cellphone. No weapon was recovered.
But these police officers will likely get away with this murder by claiming they were “in fear of their lives” from a guy with a cellphone in his grandparents’ back yard. We know this because white cops get away with murdering black people on a regular basis. Look at the case of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, LA.
The Washington Post: Baton Rouge police release video showing fatal shooting of Alton Sterling, plan to fire one officer.
Police in Baton Rouge announced Friday night that they will fire Officer Blane Salamoni for violating department policies during the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling in July 2016.
A Reclining woman reading, by Albert Ritzberger
The announcement came three days after state prosecutors announced that Salamoni and Officer Howie Lake would not face criminal charges in the shooting, which came at a time of intense national scrutiny of police use of force and prompted massive local protests. Lake, the department announced Friday, will be suspended for three days.
Police Chief Murphy Paul said in a news conference Friday that Salamoni had violated the department’s “training and organizational” standards….
As it announced Salamoni’s firing, the department also released new, graphic videos of the confrontation that led to Sterling’s death, captured by the body camera Salamoni was wearing.
While the department had initially reported that the officer’s camera had fallen off and had not captured relevant video, one of the video clips released Friday shows Salamoni arriving on the scene and immediately shouting profanities at Sterling and threatening to shoot him in the head.
“What I did, sir?” Sterling responds at one point.
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot your f—ing ass, b—h!” Salamoni replies. “Put your f—ing hands on the car or I’m going to shoot your f—ing head!”
Sterling replies “All right” and tells officers that they are hurting his arm. The officers proceed to shock Sterling with a stun gun and tackle him before ultimately shooting him.
Sterling had a gun in his pocket and did have a criminal history, but Louisiana has an open carry law and the gun was legal. It’s difficult to see how Sterling could have gotten the gun out of his pocket while he was pinned down by two cops.
And then there’s the black woman in Texas who is being sent to prison for voting. The Washington Post: Texas woman sentenced to 5 years in prison for voting while on probation.
Jeune femme lisant, by Jean-Charles Tardieu (1865-1930)
If she had known it was illegal, Crystal Mason said she would have never cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election.
The 43-year-old former tax preparer hadn’t even planned on voting until her mother encouraged her to do it. She had only recently been released from federal prison for a 2012 tax fraud conviction, in which she pleaded guilty to inflating returns for her clients, her attorney, J. Warren St. John, told The Washington Post.
She was still on community supervision at the time of the election — but no one, including her probation officer, St. John said, ever told her that being a felon on supervision meant she couldn’t vote under Texas law.
Now, she’s going back to prison for casting a ballot illegally — for five years.
Mason was indicted on a charge of illegal voting in Tarrant County, Tex., last year and found guilty by State District Judge Ruben Gonzalez on Thursday, despite her protestations that she simply was not aware that she was barred from casting a ballot and never would have done it had she known.
Unbelievable.
So . . . what else is happening? What stories are you following today?
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